A trio of impressions for games that I've not beaten, and don't plan on beating. Part of my resolution when committing to tackling my backlog was that, if I really wasn't looking forward to playing more of the game, I wouldn't force myself to play. So... it's a different format. I reckon I finished these games past their halfway points, at least, so I think I've played them enough to discuss them pretty fairly.
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- Title: Crypt of the Necrodancer
Platform: PS4
What is it?: A pixel art indie rouge-like dungeon crawler. What makes it unique is that your character is forced to move to a beat after an encounter with the Necrodancer. All movements are in tune with a beat, including enemies and bosses encountered through the dungeons.
Why Didn't I Beat It: There's this insane difficulty spike in the fourth and final area of the dungeon that I've been stuck on for weeks. Once you get through the dungeon, you have to fight two bosses in a row, too, and if you fail on either of them, you have to try the whole process over again. It's excruciating, and I finally just got fed up. Besides, apparently to fully beat the story, you need to play as another character who dies the instant you miss a beat. I'm NOT doing that.
My Thoughts: I bought this when Cadence of Hyrule was announced, and... honestly, I'm not really impressed. The pixel art is unremarkable. For an ostensibly rhythm based game, the music is utterly forgettable. And, to be honest, the "rhythm" aspect of the gameplay is overrated: you're just forced to move to a beat. Otherwise, it's a really bog-standard indie rougelike, and I don't think it deserves the acclaim it has received.
With that said, I remain somewhat optimistic about the Nintendo crossover. Artists who worked on Sonic Mania are doing the pixel art for that game, and it shows, because it's a MUCH prettier game than this one, and I'm sure the inclusion of remixed Zelda music will make it nicer to listen to. Hopefully the gameplay balance is adjusted somewhat so that the final stretch of the game is fairer to the player.
What is it?: A unique JRPG with a constantly shifting cast where you play as this clan of people cursed to age quickly and die after a couple of years. They're unable to reproduce with other humans, but you can both adopt people into your clan as well as reproducing with a veritable harem of male and female gods. You have to manage your family tree and make sure you have a constant stream of new clan members "in the oven," so to speak, so that you always have people to take out and advance the game through dungeon exploration.
Why Didn't I Beat It: Two reasons. First, the strict time limits on everything kind of wore on me. You can only advance the plot if you happen to find a portal to a demon realm, where you'll fight a boss, hidden in the depths of one of the dungeons once every year. The rest of the year is just composed of child-rearing, base-building (you can gradually upgrade your town), and training up your newest batch of soldiers to take on the next boss before they die. This was fine on its own, but then the game decided to go and force you, 1/3 of the way in, to have a particular re-incarnated goddess named Nueko in your party whenever you want to fight a boss. This throws off the rhythm of the gameplay, and, honestly, the more the game starts shifting to focus on Nueko, the more it devalues the contributions of your own clan members. It made me feel like my clan was nothing more than a disposable set of body-guards for Nueko, who was the real target of interest in the game. Anyway, after this became the norm for the game, I lost interest in playing it. I might go back to it someday, but I feel like I've experienced most of what the game has to offer.
My Thoughts: This game is hugely unique, but, at the same time, its utterly unconventional structure has some major issues that made me yearn for more traditional JRPGs. It's frustrating to spend 11 out of 12 months in an in-game year feeling like I'm just burning time until the next boss battle arrives. I like the base-building and child-rearing elements, but they don't feel fleshed out enough to justify the way it's set up. There's virtually no overarching plot chaining the experience together. You get little bits of dialogue and some cutscenes when the time comes to nab another one of the divine instruments at a demon feast, but otherwise you're running through the same cycle of dungeon crawling and (pricey) reproduction through the rest of the year. Now, I'm a gameplay-focused sort of gamer, and if this had the sort of depth you typically see in something like... Diablo, or a Souls game, then I could mostly forgive the absence of an overarching plot. But there are only a small number of dungeons in this game, and they're all tiny (which they kind of have to be, given the limited amount of time you have to explore: each month in the dungeon is ten or twenty minutes in real time). Even more damning is the absence of any real design in them. Some areas are locked off by keys, but the keys you need to unlock doors in that dungeon might not even be found in that dungeon, making is so that you have no guarantee of progressing further in a given run. These dungeons are also slowly unlocked over the course of the game as you retrieve more of the instruments, meaning that you'll spend a ton of time in this game effectively grinding the same sets of floors in the same few dungeons over and over to level up your characters, gain badly needed devotion, and, sadly enough, kill time between boss fights that progress the story.
The localization is another weak area for this title. Despite the relatively small amount of dialogue to parse, I still noticed a number of examples of broken English. It's as if the game itself was translated by non-native speakers.
The best aspect of the game is its presentation. Much like Okami, this game is set in ancient Japan and has a vibrant, cel-shaded look to it, which really makes the environments and characters pop.
One thing, in particular, that I'd like to draw attention to is the animated cutscenes, which are frequently long and incredibly well-animated. The cutscene that starts off the game feel somewhere between five and ten minutes long, and it does a great job of setting the game's tone: a bizarre mix of creative and macabre, which seems to so often be the case with older supernatural mythology.
While there aren't a huge number of interesting characters in this game, I really like Kōchin, a weasel girl (that is, a weasel that is turned transformed into something resembling a human girl) who helps to manage the daily affairs of my clan and who will even recommend courses of action to take on a given month. At the start of the game, when the structure of it seems incredibly open (before you really get a sense of how... limited your options are), going with Kōchin's automated suggestions feels like a massive help. While the character never really grows or evolves over the course of the game, she's cute and gives you a sense of familiarity as your clan members endlessly cycle in and out of your party over the course of many in-game years.
The best thing I can say about the game is that it's utterly unlike anything I've ever played before. Oreshika: Tainted Bloodlines is absolutely bursting with strange and novel ideas and mechanics. While the gameplay is too basic in design to support an experience of this length, I do feel like there's a lot of potential here for a more fleshed-out adventure.
Score: 6/10
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- Title: Star Fox Guard
Platform: Wii U
What is it?: A companion game to Star Fox Zero. It's a sort of twist on the tower defense genre where you play as a defense contractor who is hired to help defend a variety of mining bases from attacks by invading armies of robots. You're tasked with setting up various security cameras around the base in the optimal way to detect and intercept the robots before they reach the center of the base.
Why Didn't I Beat It: Got bored with it. While it slowly adds some upgrades and new enemies that behave differently, the gameplay cycle grew old very quickly for me.
My Thoughts: It's difficult to come down hard on this, considering it's just an extra that was originally included with Star Fox Zero. It has a decent amount of content to it in terms of enemy variety and the number of levels included, but it all just feels the same before too long. As a Wii U tech demo, it would have been kind of neat, but this came way too late in the system's lifecycle to feel relevant at all.
Not bad, by any stretch of the imagination. Just kind of boring. Boring enough that I don't want to return to it.
Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back (PS4): I managed to get 100% in the game, with all crystals and gems. The only trophies I missed are the relic time trials and the 99 lives trophies, which I don't want to do.
It was good fun, just like the first game. The difficulty seemed much better balanced in the this game. There's still plenty of tough levels and getting some of the gems is very challenging, but thankfully it doesn't have much in the way of super tough infuriating levels that the first game had (I'm looking at you The High Road). Lining up some of the jumps in Crash 2 could be a bit tricky at times due to the camera view, but other than that the difficulty was just right.
There was a good variety of levels, each of which generally felt distinct and creative. The level design was mostly very well done. I didn't think that boss levels weren't that great in Crash 2. Bosses seemed to be too easy this time around, and none of them took more than a few tries for me to complete.
Another minor annoyance for me was the secret entrances to some levels. There isn't much indication that secret entrances exists, so it meant that I wasted a lot of time trying to find missing gems or crates in a level, unaware that it was actually impossible to get them without entering via a different route. Also, having nitro crates occasionally bounce up when trying to jump over them is pure evil.
Overall, I really enjoyed this. It's one of the better platformers on the PS4.
@crimsontadpoles I completely agree with everything you said there. It’s an improvement on the first game in almost every way but the boss levels are pretty pathetic.
The third game feels like a bit of a drag and has too many novelty levels. I’d definitely suggest having a break before playing it so it doesn’t feel too similar to the second game.
Edit: I also couldn’t be bothered with the time trial or 99 lives trophies either.
Finally finished dark souls remastered. Great game, only part i didnt like was giants tomb place, almost quit while playing that area. Not because it was too hard but because it just wasnt very fun. Now on to DS2.
@ellsworth004 Tomb of the Giants is an absolute horror. When people say the first game is the best, I think they're forgetting about this whole area. And I don't blame them.
Good job, Parappa. You can go on to the next stage now.
@RogerRoger Great stuff. I was looking forward to reading your thoughts on Inquisition and they didn't disappoint. The bit with Alistair and Hawke was unbelievable, and the climactic decision unbearable (I went with Hawke - even though I felt a similar attachment to my Hawke as you did to yours, it just felt like the right place for his story to come to an end, whereas it didn't feel right for Alistair).
I'd have to agree with your criticisms. I don't even remember the last boss, and yes, Blackwall is so dull and gruff he makes Sean Bean look like Gloria Estefan. I loved Solus though, but this might be due to watching my wife's playthrough. She romanced him, so you can imagine the rollercoaster of emotions she went through.
One way I felt it did improve on DAII was in fleshing out Cassandra's character. I thought she was brilliant in Inquisition, whereas I found her a bit too straight-laced in II.
Judging from the pics, your main character was eerily similar to mine, he even looked the same, and his name began with J. He was a mage though. I think it's the first and only time I've gone for the mage class in these kind of games, usually I opt for the boring sword-and-shield grunt.
Great game and one I do plan to hopefully replay at some point.
Good job, Parappa. You can go on to the next stage now.
@RogerRoger Ah, no need for a tag. I'd been keeping one eye on your Inquisition progress, both on here and via the trophies you were picking up, even if I didn't say anything. I didn't trust myself not to accidentally reveal a spoiler.
I nearly went with Alistair. It's an impossible decision, one that is made even harder by the fact you don't see it coming (I didn't anyway). Poor Alistair. If it makes you feel any better, I'm sure he met his fate with the same touchingly defiant sense of gallows humour that he used to meet all other challenges in life.
I don't think I'd go mage again (although it meant I had no real use for Solus and thus didn't have to go through the same emotional wringer my wife did). Too much micromanagement when, like you say, I'm happier charging in and wrecking folks.
Farpoint (PS4/VR) - A Sci-fi themed FPS, where you're out to find your way off an alien planet after crash landing.
As a VR Experience: The few times you rode in a suttle (such as the opening scene where you were flying around a space station, plus the following crash landing) were really cool. The way the jumping spider enemies (the first enemy type you encounter) move is just right enough that they creep out your subconscious and make you jump everytime you encounter them (at least for the first few hours), and the sense of scale during the game's one boss encounter is truly mesmerizing. There is one stealth section that is pretty intense as well, as you'll constantly be looking over your shoulder to make sure a drone isn't swooping down from behind as you hightail it to the next area of cover. However, while there are a few interesting setpieces, most of the game takes place in a sort of canyony desert theme, and while I suppose it makes decent use of the depth effect, it's not a particularly interesting place to be, though a couple of later missions shake things up a bit. Oh, and there are also video logs (at the end of most missions) that make good use of the effect as well.
As a game: It's a pretty standard FPS. Kill things in a larger area, settle down as you walk along the path where you're either treated to a hologram that moves the story along, a setpiece, and or maybe a jumpscare ambush by one or two enemies, before coming to the next open area where you'll fight another large group of enemies, rinse & repeat (later levels tend to have less downtime with more constant large enemy encounters, but I honestly preferred the balance of the early game). It's not particularly great as a game, but they regularly introduce new enemy types & weapons so things never get boring (your gun is tied to the motion of your controller, so you physically have to look down the sight correctly in order to accurately shoot anything, which you'll know you're doing correctly when you see a lazer sight in the middle of your reticule, which is pretty cool). The main story has 8 missions which on average are an hour long each (at least for me), plus there is a challenge mode that sees you tackling the story missions in a time trial like environment, standard online multiplayer, plus a co-op mode of some sort (I assume online for that as well). I wasn't a big fan of how the story ended up, though.
Currently Playing:
Switch - Blade Strangers
PS4 - Kingdom Hearts III, Tetris Effect (VR)
Just finished Deltarune Chapter 1. It was... alright. Definitely a good time for a free game. I wasn't hugely impressed, though. The world that was introduced just wasn't developed enough to give it a sense of character. Most of the new characters, outside of Susie, weren't terribly memorable. Making the sparing mechanic a constant part of the plot itself takes away from the subversion of typical JRPG tropes and the personal responsibility the player felt for behaving like they would in any other game (what unspoiled player didn't initially kill Toriel, only to feel a gut-wrenching sense of guilt when they realized what they had done?). Figuring out how to negotiate enemies out of a battle is still cute and fun, but it's too reminiscent of Undertale's system, and there's nothing quite as memorable as, say, getting the two guards to realize their love for one-another (was very happy to see them later in the game!). And the way you interact with Lancer is far too similar to initial run-ins with Sans and Papyrus in Undertale. It was very Undertale-lite. Diet Undertale.
With that said, I didn't dislike my time with it. I thought Susie's primary character arc was reasonably well-executed, even if it was a bit rushed. The game is still filled with the sort of wonderful humor that was so charming in the original Undertale. I also like how you gain TP when enemy attacks come close without actually damaging you, and there's an interesting risk/reward mechanic there. And the end of the game, where you get to travel around your home town and talk to the townsfolk, many of who return from the original game, was a lot of fun, and helped showcase the great character writing that is clearly the developer's specialty.
Also really liked the creepy cliffhanger at the very end.
If the rest of it was eventually released as a full game, I'd absolutely purchase, play, and enjoy my time with it. But I do feel like it needs to do more to distinguish itself from its predecessor.
@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Heh, that probably won't be for a while. That game got put on hold after the first couple of major dungeons. I need to get back to it.
I actually... didn't even know that was a thing until you mentioned it. Now that I've gone back and looked around more, though, I realize those keys actually had a purpose.
And, geez, this boss sucks. I'm going to need to upgrade my armor to deal with him peacefully. Reminds me of some of those hard-as-nails fights in the genocide run of Undertale.
Currently Playing: Resident Evil Village: Gold Edition
@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Re Policewoman Undyne, I like how she's apparently struggling to re-integrate into a peaceful society. It makes sense that it would be difficult for a warrior like her to transition to a productive role in an entirely peaceful society.
I forgot to mention this, but I do think the pixel art has improved since Undertale. It's easier to notice a lot of subtle details in the character designs. The environments can look pretty good, too. I really liked the lighting in the school at the end of the game after you return to the closet.
Currently Playing: Resident Evil Village: Gold Edition
@bruhman well done persevering through the entire game plus DLC while not enjoying it, not an easy task with a Dark Souls game! Most people would just give up!
I actually started playing the remaster last night, i’ve just beaten the boss near the start on that long bridge and moved onto the next area. I’m enjoying it so far. I played through about 90% of DS3 and got distracted. I didn’t like DS2 much and only played the first couple of sections of that. I’m thinking about giving it another go after DS1 though as I played DS2 right after Bloodborne (and before DS3) so it was all a bit much.
As for your question, DS1 is often considered the best, but really all the games seem to be favoured equally by whoever you ask. So if you really didn’t think much of 1 I don’t think it’s worth putting yourself through the rest.
As for distances between bosses I did notice it was a bit of a treck between the bonfire and the bridge boss last night, but if you just sprint past everything it’s pretty easy to get back to him. I don’t know if it gets harder to do that moving forward. I sprinted to bosses a lot in DS3.
@bruhman I played through all of ds3 (not dlc though) and got to sens fortress in remaster before having a long break. My experience of ds3 was bonfires were a bit closer to boss fogs and other than a few levels (cathedral of the deep is an exception), most of the levels are more linear. I enjoyed 1 and would go back to it but 1 and 3 are very similar for me. Ds3 almost feels like a remake than a sequel sometimes. Bloodborne would be the one I would recommend, even though pvp is not as good as ds3, its brilliant!!
@bruhman :') Nah I'm not using a guide and don't really plan on it, while I'm having fun I'll keep plugging though, I don't really mind dropping it if it just becomes annoying I guess.
I do kind of like having multiple ways to go, some of which end up being impossible lol.
I’m really glad to know that there are others out there trying to make their way through Lordran. I’m taking my first crack at Dark Souls Remastered. The only other From Software game I’ve played was Bloodborne, which I really enjoyed. There’s something I find really compelling about the Land of the Ancient Lords, even though I end up dying...like, everywhere. Still, I’m starting to get parrying down to a science.
@bruhman nah it doesn't sound daft, it's a freaky game!! Im the same about alien isolation, I've nearly bought it a few times and keep wimping out at the last minute. Hope you enjoy ds3 if you give it a bash, some amazing boss fights in that game!
What is it?: A remake of the N64 classic Star Fox 64 (which itself was a remake of the much more rudimentary SNES original).
Level of completion: Unlocked all the extra routes, levels, and events, so I've beaten pretty much the entire game. Did not get the highest score on every level, however.
What I liked:
The fun animated short that was included that functions as a prologue to the story in the game. It's not going to blow anyone away, but I always find cross-media storytelling techniques like this to be, if nothing else, quite interesting.
So, in this game, you have two viewpoints: one on the TV that's third-person and gives you a sense of where your ship is, like in a traditional Star Fox game, and then one on the GamePad that's in first-person. Aiming in this game is totally liberated from the manner in which you fly your ship, so you use gyro controls to aim your blaster. And, despite my significant misgivings with this dual-screen set-up, I'll say that I really found the gyro aiming to be responsive and fun to use. As always, Nintendo reveals themselves to be the masters of the effective use of motion controls in gaming.
Ditching single-screen gameplay allows you to pull off some interesting maneuvers, such as shooting at a target while flying away from it, for example. It also allows you to have interesting camera viewpoints in some of the huge boss battles, instead of the game forcing the camera to stay locked behind the Arwing the entire time.
Some of the unlockable content is interesting. For example, there's one level that you can go back to after you receive a certain upgrade to your Arwing, and you can unlock a level where you play as Peppy Hare and take on a gigantic enemy battleship by yourself. It's not the best thing ever, but stuff like this is fun. You can also unlock some extra matches against Star Wolf's crew.
What I disliked:
Oh boy...
So there are problems in virtually every area of this game. I'll just start with the dual-screen set-up, which is the most immediate and obvious issue with this game: the unwieldy dual-screen set-up. Maintaining a sense of awareness of both is crucial, considering aiming is far too imprecise on the TV, but you still need to reference it to make sure you're not into obstacles or whatnot. This makes it where your attention is constantly split between the two screens, which is pretty much constantly stressful, even after you learn to adapt to it somewhat. Unlike a game on the Nintendo DS, where the two screens are extremely close, you're having to look down in your hands to up at a TV, back and forth, as you play. It's extremely unpleasant. What this does is rob this rail shooter of the operational simplicity that is the biggest appeal and hallmark of the rail shooter in the first place. It inserts this big, middling control issue directly in-between you and the game, and even after you learn how to manage it enough to complete levels easily, it definitely saps most of the fun out of the experience. It's even worse in free-range levels, with a lot of movement and dodging, as with certain bosses, where I constantly felt like I was fighting the controls more than the enemy itself.
That's hardly the end of this game's issues, though. For one thing, it's incredibly derivative. A lot of the missions in this game are just straight up lifted, aesthetics and all, from Star Fox 64, and, unlike that game, it almost never successfully introduces new level designs or engaging mechanics. There's a sense of "been there, done that" the whole way through. It's incredibly uninspired.
When the game does attempt to do new things, it's pretty much always to its detriment. One area where this becomes especially clear is when the game introduces new vehicles to the mix. The worst of these is the Gyrowing, which is a clunky, difficult to control, and slow moving helicopter of sorts where you spend the majority of a level awkwardly navigating your way from one boring environmental puzzle to another. I'm not sure what the game is going for in these levels, but it's pretty much the opposite of what you'd want or expect from a high-speed space shooter. The walker (or, as I call it, the Star Chicken, because it looks disturbingly similar to a chicken) itself is a total nightmare to control, and any level that employees it heavily often sees me frequently crash into walls as I try to navigate the level geometry. The game pushes Star Chicken transformations in boss battles, but, more often than not, I find it to be such a hindrance that I'll opt for the Arwing even when its not suited for a level. This becomes especially the case in the obnoxious final boss encounter with Andross, where the challenge really comes from trying to juggle multiple different styles of control simultaneously to even do something as simple as move, aim at the boss, and shoot where you want. Apparently the Star Chicken was introduced in Star Fox 2 on the SNES, but, having never played that, I don't know if it's any more tolerable there.
Visually, the game is bland, and reminds me of what a launch GameCube game might look like upscaled to 720p. This is probably due to the game streaming two different views of the game at all times, which must be costly in terms of resource requirements. Of course, the game doesn't do nearly enough new stuff with this to justify moving away from the series' traditionally single-screen gameplay.
The narrative presentation is especially unambitious and does nothing that the original Star Fox 64 didn't already do decades ago. The music is serviceable, but the best tracks are all taken directly from SF64.It fails as a story, fails as a tech showcase, and even fails the basic test of being a fun, approachable rail shooter.
Final thoughts: Innovative in ways that didn't require innovation and unchanged in ways that make it feel stale, this game represents a solid backward step for the franchise as a whole. I really wanted to like it, but I just didn't. Definitely not the worst game ever made, but I do think it deserved to be savaged the way it did. This lack of polish is totally unacceptable for a major Nintendo property.
Yakuza Kiwami is finished. Inconsistent gameplay married to a consistently excellent story You can really feel that PS2 architecture lurking in the background. Some of the boss fights are a bit of a chore, but with the right abilities unlocked and a stack of healing items, they're all right. They overdid the Majima element massively - I'm sick of the sight of the guy.
@ShogunRok got a bit of stick for the review at the time, but six out of ten is bang on. I'm going to play Kiwami 2 next (though not just yet) and then probably Zero. After that, well it depends what happens with the western re-releases of 3-4-5. It's all gone a bit quite on that front. Anyone heard anything about them?
Good job, Parappa. You can go on to the next stage now.
@Kyroki Undertale only felt like a "complete" experience to me when I got the true pacifist and genocide mode endings. And definitely don't neglect genocide: the best bosses and a solidly different approach to the gameplay and plot are locked behind it. It's also where the game's best satirical jabs at traditional JRPG game design can be found.
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