Fire Emblem Engage on the Nintendo Switch. I picked it up ten days ago and have already put more than forty hours into it. While I prefer the more serious tone and grounded character writing in Three Houses and Echoes, Engage still manages to be both a technical showpiece for the Nintendo Switch and compulsively playable. This will be a minimum 60 hour playthrough, but probably closer to 80.
Speaking of the 3DS, I went back into my old save file for Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call, since the demo for the PS4/Switch sequel reminded me how much I liked it. While I'm not really sold on its RPG mechanics, it's hard to ruin a rhythm game based on a series known for its amazing music like Final Fantasy. It's just a pity that none of these games are gonna have tracks based on the Pixel Remaster versions of the games, which sounds so much better than the classic chiptune tracks in the NES/SNES Final Fantasy games.
I've also been playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 on my Wii U. I've technically finished it already, since I cleared the main story and hit the credits, but anyone who knows SMG2 knows that the majority of the content in this game is either optional or in the post-game. It's one of the last 3D Mario games I haven't 100%ed yet, so I'll be pecking at it for a while.
@Ralizah I've been interested in getting Curtain Call after my renewed interest in the 3DS. While there's a new Theatrhythm game on the horizon, I just can't imagine playing this series on the Switch. I prefer touch controls and I would rather not sully my Switch screen. Even if I can avoid that, it would be rather difficult to hold the Switch with one hand. For these reasons, I really want to get the 3DS game. Would you say that that's good enough for me to get it?
@Ralizah The demo for the new Theatrhythm really disappointed me. The fact that the Switch version has no support for touch controls is annoying, that’s how I played Curtain Call and I was good enough to full Critical every song in the game with that control scheme. I’m not as good with the buttons and it made it quite hard to get into the demo.
@LtSarge Well, Final Bar Line (the one on Switch) doesn't have the option for touch controls. It's buttons only. Curtain Call is the only entry in the series that supports both touch controls AND buttons.
CC is a pretty massive improvement over the original Theatrhythm, so if you want to play on 3DS, that's the one to get. It's, like, 70 songs in the original vs 200+ in CC. It's supposed to be a rhythm RPG where you go on quests, collect items, customize characters, etc. But, in my experience, those aspects don't really matter if you're just playing through normal songs, and only come into play when you're doing long quests on high difficulty settings, where you're more likely to screw up while going through various tricky stages.
So, IMO, if you're looking for a meaty RPG-adjacent experience, I don't think Curtain Call does a good job of offering that. If you want an excuse to experience various Final Fantasy songs in rhythm game form, though, it does the job well enough. My only real issue is that the sound isn't especially loud in the 3DS games. It was like night and day going from playing the demo for FBL on my Switch OLED to playing my cartridge of Curtain Call.
To be clear, Final Bar Line is going to be the superior experience in nearly every way. Out of the box, it has 167 more songs than Curtain Call, and its way less expensive to expand the song list via DLC if you go with the digital deluxe option (no idea what DLC pricing is like outside of that for FBL). It also has superior audio quality and improves the RPG aspects in some minor ways. If you'd still rather just play Curtain Call on 3DS with a stylus, though, you're not going to have a bad time. It's almost undoubtedly the best rhythm/music game on 3DS.
@nessisonett It seems like a missed opportunity not to patch touch controls into the Switch version when played undocked, at least. Nevertheless, I've always preferred button controls, so that aspect doesn't bother me.
Finished both Rome and Russia in Tomb Raider Chronicles and really enjoyed them actually. They feel like condensed, purely distilled Tomb Raider in that a lot of the irritating fat has been trimmed but they remain true to the original games. After playing the first two levels of Ireland, I can’t say the same for that chapter! It’s bizarre, it barely feels like a Tomb Raider game. Hopefully the last chapter is a bit more interesting than wandering round a forest with no weapons.
@RogerRoger Yeah, I’ve been wandering around The Old Mill for what feels like an eternity which has cemented Ireland as one of my least favourite locations in the series so far. I’ve heard some bad things about Red Alert so we’ll see if I actually finish the game!
@RogerRoger I at least actually finished The Old Mill so now I seem to be playing Syphon Filter. They really tried to make any game other than Tomb Raider at this point!
With me having finished Tomb Raider Chronicles, I gave The Angel of Darkness a go this afternoon and yeah, the controls are diabolical. That being said, there’s a sort of odd wonky charm to it? It’s clearly very ambitious and I quite enjoyed wandering around Paris even if it was a bit obtuse. Putting in mechanics from old PC adventure games is an inspired move, I know that the reboot used Metroidvanias as a base instead but I really liked that sorta Broken Sword or Gabriel Knight feel you get from talking to NPCs around Paris to find out where you need to go next. There are some truly mind-boggling decisions though. Lara not being able to hang long enough so she has to train her upper body strength? Great idea. Doing this via shoulder barging a random door elsewhere in the level? Baffling. It’s the weird way it’s presented too, I pushed a box as her later on and she just said out loud ‘My legs feel stronger now’. It’s truly absurd.
@RogerRoger I’m onto the archeological dig now after beating The Louvre and I’m actually really enjoying the game. If you accept the controls as rubbish then it’s easier to see the many positives. I’d guess that most detractors probably didn’t get past the first Paris streets section because it becomes a much more traditional Tomb Raider after that. There’s a bit less combat than I expected though, which is a shame because the ragdoll physics are hilarious.
Someone gifted me a 1-month Game Pass sub recently, so I'm playing through a couple games on there. Started Soul Hackers 2, which was just recently added to the service, along with Vampire Survivors. Glad I didn't pick up SH2 on PS4, as it definitely runs beautifully on my PC. VS was one I wanted on my Switch, but decided to start on PC since I have access to it anyway, and I definitely get why it hooked people so badly. There's literally nothing to the gameplay aside from (slowly) weaving your way in-between hordes of enemies, like you're trying to survive a wave of attacks in a bullet hell shooter, but the steady pace of in-game rewards and character improvements makes it feel deeply rewarding.
Currently Playing: The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy (PC)
@RogerRoger One of the best PS2 games if you ask me. I love 3D hack & slash games, and it holds up surprisingly well for one of the earlier games of the genre.
I am someways into chapter 2 of my Life is Strange Steam Deck replay and not gonna lie, I am having a real hard time with it.
It manages to be somehow more gameplay intensive than True Colors but in a bad way, while also somehow managing to be really boring, too. Like it almost feels like the meme version of what everyone complained True Colors to be (but wasn't really).
I would agree True Colors probably moved too quickly, I think it took me less than 20 hours to clear that game twice and that was with taking the time to explore the town, do side stuff and conversations etc. Steam puts me at over 5 hours into Life is Strange already and I've not even finished the second chapter yet. Madness.
But what has LiS done with all this extra time? Not a lot, honestly. Like imagine all of the walking around clicking on stuff to start conversations you did in True Colors, but make each of those sequences three times as long and make sure that absolutely no one has anything interesting to say at all.
I will also say it is a fair criticism that the powers in True Colors are not integrated very well, and they are sorta in a rush to get everyone to just be on the same page as Alex about her powers they can move on. I also feel the use of the powers kinda feeds into the wider anti climax that game has, because it sorta sets a precedent for the story to be grander than it is, when really it is fairly mundane.
Here, they do a much better job with this in Life is Strange narratively, where the powers are a central part of the story, people react like a human being would when someone tells you they have literal superpowers, and no True Colors, that doesn't mean a shrug of the shoulders and the coming storm, and use of flashes forwards and backwards is a nice narrative wrap around for all the proceedings.
The problem is they make you use your powers a lot more outside of just key sequences and make it feel more like a game. This should be a positive, but they execute this in either the most frustrating of ways (instadeath puzzle things) or in ways that are mind bogglingly tedious (memory games and other rubbish) or in ways that somewhat cheapen the experience, as almost every choice can be selected and experienced, and then you can rewind and pick your favourite one. Sure you won't know what later consequences come of this, but I actually like having to live with a choice, if I want to experience things differently I will play it again, I think rewinds suck in these sorts of games.
I actually am not surprised now replaying this as to why True Colors basically removed this stuff entirely, if Alex needed to convince Ryan her power was real by telling him what action figure he got for his 4th Birthday, what type of cake it was, how many candles were on the cake and what shoes he had on, and you fail this until you remember all four things exactly, then I might not have ever finished that game. How powerful is that moment where you look at the clouds with Ryan and experience his joy? Without it giving you some instafail do over pop quiz rubbish.
And I guess maybe this is all intended to pace the experience, but I feel like this would feel glacially slow without these gameplay sections, with them it feels like we are going backwards.
It probably doesn't help that so far I really don't like these characters at all, either. And at least some of that is probably by design and intended to increase the authenticity of the characters or whatever, but being cringe doesn't become less cringe because you are intentionally cringe.
Further, given Life is Strange is a much older game, and I'm playing a on a handheld device, I can really crank up the settings in a way I couldn't with True Colors, so it isn't the massive technical stepdown like I expected. Where the age does catch up with Life is Strange though is in the facial animation, or almost complete lack of.
True Colors has some of the best facial animation in the business for my money, and they let the actors do a lot of storytelling with facial expressions and body language. Here, faces are almost entirely static, all the time, which means the voice actors have to really do all the heavy lifting with their performances. And the performances are fine, but I dunno, as someone is giving this big emotional declaration and their eyes are darting around inside of a weird static mannequin face, it sorta becomes more funny and absurd to me than emotionally arresting.
I do like the whole Donnie Darko vibe this has, though and am gonna see this through to the end regardless, so fingers crossed the later chapters are better.
My memory caught up just moments before the reveal and that seemed to knock the wind out of me even harder and was the first time this game really genuinely made me feel something, and I felt it strongly, too.
For as much as I dislike the moment to moment gameplay in LiS - I still find a lot of it really tedious and I kinda wish they'd just get on with it. Narratively, what they have done with Max's power is excellent and really makes me realise how under utilised Alex's power was really by comparison.
I know that the ending to Chapter 2 is maybe a bigger shock if you balls it up (like I did) but I dunno, there I was less shocked by the emotional punch and more just generally impressed this could be failed at all.
I'm sure the game isn't sent on a drastically different path due to this, and I'm sure there is like an exact sequence of responses you need to press to clear this, so it isn't really about a culmination of your decisions, but it did a really excellent job at smoke and mirrorsing me anyway, as Kate referenced past choices I made and seemed to genuinely be moving closer and further to the edge based on each response I provided.
It kinda put into perspective how many choices in True Colors don't really matter. Like they matter when it comes to the purest sense of roleplay where you want Alex to be a certain kind of person, but the key narrative beats are going to be basically identical every playthrough and most key decisions are binary, you pick one or two decisions and they lead to a fixed outcome that aren't influenced by anything other than that one choice. The fact I have this moment of failure on the roof, which potentially someone else isn't going to have, is more than really True Colors can say throughout the game, unless you want to count like failing the jukebox game or whatever.
@AgentCooper There’s a main story in Skyrim??? All joking aside, I’ve spent probably in the thousands of hours in that world across like 4 consoles and it just doesn’t get old. One of the best games ever imo.
@AgentCooper For all the flack the series gets, the older Assassin's Creed games are genuinely a great time. You have so many great experiences ahead of you!
Speaking of Assassin's Creed, I'm playing the first 2.5D Assassin's Creed Chronicles game on PS4 and I'm sadly not having a good time with it. While the China setting is cool, the game just feels so bland and uninteresting to play. I definitely prefer the 3D games more and I can't wait to play Assassin's Creed Mirage when it comes out.
I've played AC games on and off from the beginning, but never much cared for them. I know a lot of people hate it, but Odyssey was the game that got me to care about Assassin's Creed (even if the follow up, Valhalla, was an absolute snooze fest). Odyssey is one of my favourite games ever, and Kassandra really awoke something in me (😂).
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