@Ralizah I thought Sayonara Umihara Kawase was alright, but has its flaws. It gets repetitive, and the difficulty spikes and insane toughness of a few levels make it very tedious in places.
Very well done on completing stage 46 and beating that horrific boss. That's my most attempted stage with 95 failures before I gave up on it.
Somehow I managed to complete 46/50 stages and get 3/5 endings, though I've forgotten most of the game by now.
@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Oh yes, I definitely have stuff I want to say about DDS. I don't know that it'll be one of my favorite MegaTen games, but it is interesting nonetheless.
@crimsontadpoles LOL I know I'm going to see that stupid crab in my nightmares at some point.
Stage 33 was also pretty hellish. There's almost nowhere to land that isn't covered in spikes. Ugh.
The funny thing is that I probably skipped a number of much easier stages when quitting after stage 46, but, by that point, it had just drained the life out of me.
The most painful thing is almost finishing a stage and then screwing up as you're about done.
Currently Playing: The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy (PC)
@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy The meta commentary of the twist is definitely very well done. The full impact of the twist was definitely lessened for me, but the actual reveal scene is incredibly well done. "A slave obeys, a man chooses" is going to stick with me for a while. Incredibly written and directed, that scene.
The self-contained story of Minerva's Den being a step away from the more critically maligned BioShock 2 might have been a big factor in it's initial praise, indeed. I hadn't thought of that. I just think it's a very by the numbers DLC with a clever twist that doesn't really elevate it above solid.
I think it also helps in that Bioshock is not only well written but the casting choices and voice direction for the voice actors was pretty spot on too.
In fact Atlas wasn't going to be Irish apparently!
Originally Atlas had a southern accent that was done by Fontaine's voice actor of Greg Baldwin. However it turned out that play testers weren't that trusting of him
So instead they brought in voice actor Karl Hanover to do Atlas' incredibly friendly sounding and comforting Irish accent
So not only does it help preserve the twist of Fontaine being Atlas, but they ended up making it that much harder to suss out because of it
I await your DDS impressions with bated breath @Ralizah ... The final bonus boss is one tough cookie!
Well I'm eagerly awaiting your Bioshock Infinite impressions @Tjuz !
The Last Guardian. It was alright, but I feel that it could have been better. It's my least favourite out of that, Ico, and Shadow of the Colossus.
My main gripe with it is the combat. It was an interesting concept to do the opposite of Ico and have enemies try to take you away while your companion tries to protect you. However, in practice most fights weren't very fun, and just ended up with me running away from enemies or hiding behind Trico while it dealt with the baddies.
Some of the puzzles were okay, but I didn't think they were as good as the ones in Ico or SotC. There wasn't a huge variety of puzzles, as a lot of them involved either getting Trico to jump somewhere, or finding an easily overlooked path for the kid.
My big positive for this game is Trico itself. It's so adorable, and the game does a great job at creating a bond between the player and that loveable creature. I did spend quite a bit of time just interacting with it and petting it.
Overall, I'm glad that I played this game, but I wished the gameplay was a bit more fun.
@crimsontadpoles That was the point of the combat though, you are not supposed feel powerful enough to fight them and are supposed leave that to Trico.
Life is more fun when you help people succeed, instead of wishing them to fail.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
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.
I so want to do a massive discussion with ya @RogerRoger but I'm dead tired...
All I'll say for the moment is That music during the final bit of Trespasser when you're truly learning about Solas or rather Fen'heral and his plan... Beautiful , plus I quite like Enchanter, Once we were and Sera Was Never tavern songs!
@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: The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy (PC)
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