Welcome back to Indie Game of the Week, where we'll be reviewing an Indie explormer. Look, I know. I've been stuck on this one gear for quite some time. It's just... whenever a new explormer comes out and hits the zeitgeist, like it has recently for Tales of Kenzera: Zau and that Prince of Persia thing, I feel my status around here as The Explormer King start to slip all the while the demon known as FOMO rears its ugly head. The only way to purge either of those negative emotions from the ol' map-mulling melon is to dip into my reserve of unplayed explormers and take advantage of this weekly feature to satiate the traversal-upgrade-hungry beast within. But while my myriad neuroses make for fascinating reading, we should really be focusing on 9 Years of Shadows from Halberd Studios instead: a 2D explormer with gorgeous pixel art, a story vaguely related to the Greek gods and muses in a post-apocalyptic world laid under by a powerful curse, and a fluid gameplay style that finds equal challenge in its platforming and combat alike which has very much opted for Symphony of the Night as its inspirational patron.
The protagonist is Europa, a young woman turned halberd-wielding warrior after she was orphaned by the same curse that took the lives of so many. She's tracked its possible source to a tower named after (or is) Talos, the bronze giant who protected Europa's namesake from Greek mythology, and finds the place filled with mindless monsters and traps. Along her travels she encounters a spirit that calls itself Apino and resembles a floating teddy bear: Apino saves Europa after a chance encounter with a demon named Belial and becomes her steadfast companion, with many of the mechanics revolving around their partnership. Europa also keeps meeting the eccentric members of an orchestra who have been separated and terrorized by enemies in the tower: most of the game's sidequests involve defeating specific bonus bosses (who are otherwise optional) to win the musicians' support. I've no idea what all this is earning me, but I suspect it might be one of those "true ending" situations. Europa also pulls a Samus by letting us listen in on her thoughts whenever she enters an elevator transition: she'll muse about the people she's met, the dangers she's faced, and her memories of the outside world for as bleak as they often are.
I always appreciate an attractive save room. Less sure what purpose these rooms have outside the meta though.
The primary mechanic that 9 Years of Shadows does a little differently to the great crowd of these games is in how it handles health and its recuperation. Europa has both vitality and a light bar: the former is her health and usually consists of just two pips, after which she immediately dies. The light bar acts more like a shield, absorbing hits for as long as it's active. However, it's also used as the source for Apino's attacks, which provide ranged support and are usually needed to reveal a boss's weak point or activate certain switches. Whenever the light bar empties, Europa is vulnerable; however, by hugging Apino (which is seriously cute, but takes a few seconds) she can recover a major amount of her light bar. Pretty soon you can also acquire an upgrade that lets you complete a small QTE to recover light as soon as the bar empties provided you're quick enough to register it. What this creates is a system where you might be a few hits from death at any point in a fight but can otherwise heal yourself indefinitely if you're able to carve out enough time to do so: a similar system can be found in Hollow Knight and several others. One limitation is that you can't recover the light bar unless it's completely empty, so it's often the case that you'll take a hit and must quickly go on the defensive to avoid any further damage before you can recover. You can, however, shoot off a few of Apino's bullets to empty the bar yourself if you find an opportune lull in a boss fight for a quick recharge. It's an elegant system that only occasionally lets you down in boss fights where attacks are relentless, giving you few opportunities to heal: one of those came fairly early on in a battle against one (later three) sea serpent creatures, where they would sometimes charge across the screen too fast to react to. Most other boss fights have been incredibly easy in comparison, giving you plenty of moments for recovery, leaving the boss difficulty somewhat uneven.
Other mechanics tend to be pretty familiar stuff to explormer veterans. You eventually acquire different elemental armored suits for Europa, each providing a means to pass through certain areas (the red armor for overheated zones, the blue armor for underwater sections, etc.) as well as an associated traversal ability. An example would be the green armor and its power to transform Europa into a tunnelling snake, which works similarly to the morph ball except every time you move you can't stop until you hit a wall, creating a few navigational puzzles in the process. While the platforming is fluid and fun enough the combat tends to be more of an afterthought; Europa has a default three attack combo and a finisher which does considerably more damage, but that's about it and you don't really learn any new moves beyond Apino's firepower (which, given its ammo effectively doubles as your health, isn't something you might want to rely on for damage). You can upgrade each suit of armor but this only increases its attack damage by a miniscule amount and provides no other benefits that I can tell. Since the game lacks an XP/level system and most enemies only drop a small amount of currency, which you can acquire in chests in larger amounts, there's usually no reason to hang around and fight everything you see unless you're trying to fill out the in-game bestiary. Add to this that most enemies are the same crystalline-looking golem things and it's not an aspect of the game that feels like it saw much attention. The bosses, conversely, come in all shapes and sizes and when you add in the many optional battles there's plenty of variety to be had.
Character art is really sharp in this game, and you get one of these splash screens with every new suit of armor. Shockingly, getting to electrocute fools is actually the least impressive of the upgrades.
On the whole, while there's much to like about 9 Years of Shadows from its competent enough combat and exploration, plus its very attractive pixel art and equally striking hand-drawn animated sequences, it struggles to find much of an identity for itself. This is something many Indie explormers have contended with, which I've been in a position to discover firsthand as I continue to glut myself on a neverending stream of the things, and it's hard to take a game to task for being a perfectly decent if standard iteration on an increasingly well-worn formula. To me, explormers are like pizza: even the less compelling ones are still good eatin' but they're so often obligated to sticking to the same toppings every time (and risk-averse to putting something wild on there in case there's too much flak) that you really can't be eating it every meal, or every other meal, or else you'll quickly grow tired of it. But, man, when a good pizza like 9 Years of Shadows comes along at a time when you're craving some cheesy, meaty goodness, it's hard to be too mad at the fact that you'll probably forget all about it within a few days. Oh great, now I gotta go get a fucking pizza.
Rating: 4 out of 5 pepperoni. (So far. I'm pretty sure I'm near the end though.)
Welcome back to the bonus stage of history with this, the most elucidating and entertaining Nintendo 64 retrospective blog series of all those that are currently on your screen right now (aiming high with these approbations) known to those in certain circles, as well as everywhere else, as 64 in 64. We're four episodes into this final season now and I'm working on tying up all the loose ends I've created like it's the final season of Lost and I've left way too much enigmatic nonsense on the table. Just saying, don't be surprised if the finale has the random chooser app suddenly wake up and realize it dreamed all this.
In the interest of said loose ends, our pre-selected choice this week is the third game I've covered in its particular franchise out of four games to have graced the N64, so I'm not quite sure how I plan to shoehorn in that fourth and final game. The randomizer pick, coincidentally, also has us returning to a particular genre I've explored previously but in that case it's not one I'm in any hurry to revisit again for completion's sake. It's almost like that thing just chooses whatever the heck it wants, huh. This will be a pretty low-key episode all told but at least I didn't have to deal with anything too torturous, though I guess that's maybe a knock against it given how quickly this site has taken to schadenfreude with the popularity of Blight Club. Buncha animals around here, feasting on an endless trough of despair and misery.
Speaking of despair and misery, we'd best get to these rules. It's been a month I'm sure everyone's forgotten them already.
We play two N64 games for sixty-four minutes apiece. I'm using the royal "we" here, since I'm not about to find someone willing to join in on all this self-flagellation.
The first is chosen by me from the small number of half-decent N64 games still remaining, the other is selected randomly from the much greater number of zero-decent N64 games by some software I keep choosing to anthropomorphize. That little guy is truly spoiled for choice these days.
I've tried to dig up all I can on each game's history while providing a play-by-play of my struggles with it over the allotted hour, followed by a candid appraisal of its longevity and how likely it is to join the Nintendo Switch Online retro emulation library. Sometimes you need to justify spending an hour with a nothing-game by writing way more about it than you need to. Wait, I'm getting too inside baseball again.
This feature is not permitted to even breathe the same rarified air as the vaunted few already in said Nintendo Switch Online retro emulation library. They've already met whatever esoteric qualifications Nintendo has for its older games to earn a second life. Good for them. I wish Nintendo would say I was worth preserving. Wait, did I say that out loud?
I realize I may have tricked some folks with my ribald April Fools' gag earlier this month, but I assure you this is a real series that is truly on its forty-first entry. The others are all here in the table below. I swear they won't all redirect to one Mr. Astley swearing his eternal fidelity through the medium of song. Just most of them.
History: Bomberman 64: The Second Attack! is the third Bomberman to grace the Nintendo 64 and the second that Hudson developed themselves (the other, Bomberman Hero, was instead outsourced to A.I.). It plays much like the original Bomberman 64, allowing players to pump up bombs to create larger booms and offers Zelda-like 3D dungeons to explore in a mostly linear fashion with puzzles and well-hidden collectibles, with a few additional new mechanics. The story is set directly after Bomberman 64 but with a new cast of characters (mostly; a certain blue jerk makes a return) including a shapeshifting mascot familiar named Pommy who assists Bomberman and a potential love interest in the rival hero Lilith.
Hudson spent quite a while being rivals of Nintendo themselves, pushing their own hardware platform the PC Engine/Turbografx-16 for most of the 16-bit generation, but even so they were still very busy producing games on every Nintendo platform up until the company was eventually dissolved in 2012 by its parent Konami. Prior to that, much of Hudson's talent left to form NDCube: a Nintendo subsidiary that now directs the Mario Party series as well as other Switch party games like Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics. The Hudson N64 games with the highest (if not necessarily the best-regarded) profiles were the three initial Mario Party games, but they also developed and/or published several others that we might yet bump into (though at this point the only remaining ones are Japanese-only, so they'll probably be random picks if anything). I hadn't heard of Vatical Entertainment before, and it turns out there's a good reason: they were only active for three years (1999-2001). They also published the North American localizations of Bomberman Max for GBC and Bomberman Party Edition for PS1, suggesting a strong enough relationship with Hudson. They have just the one other N64 credit: Vicarious Visions's snowmobile racer Polaris SnoCross (kinda fitting given Vicarious Visions would later be consumed by a blizzard).
I was a pretty big fan of Bomberman 64 even for all its faults but I'd never tried this sequel until now, in part because it didn't review all that well at the time. Despite that, I've been curious for a long while about how (if at all) it tried to improve on the formula set out by the somewhat mechanically-odd Bomberman 64, which didn't quite take to 3D as naturally as Mario and Zelda did, and what sort of plot continuation it pursued after Bomberman 64 introduced cosmic cubes and betrayal twists to its universe of cute little armored goons blowing each other up. That first game got pretty dark, all things considered.
16 Minutes In
The beige boxes can't be destroyed, but this silver one with the crosses sure can. I just need an explosion big enough to reach it (or I could just drop a bomb down from above).
The intro gave us quite a bit of story to set us up here: Bomberman found an egg at some point while travelling the galaxy after the conclusion of Bomberman 64 but while waiting for it to hatch he gets caught in the gravity well of a black hole and ends up teleported to a mysterious base where soldiers of a "BHB Army" imprison him and take away his Fire Stone. Turns out the Fire Stone is one of seven gems that govern reality (where have I heard something like that before?) and is the reason Bomberman seems to have an infinite supply of incendiaries. While in chokey the egg finally hatches into a floppy-eared monstrosity calling itself Pommy (frequently, since it's always talking in third-person) who recovers the Fire Stone and allows Bomberman to escape by doing what he does best: blowing everything up.
First thing I noticed here is that the gameplay has shifted to something closer to the original 8-bit/16-bit Bomberman games while still retaining a few choice aspects from Bomberman 64. Gone are the radial explosions, instead going back to the cardinal cross blast waves with a few modern touches: for instance, if the flame hits an angled wall, it will travel along it for a while. You can still inflate bombs by holding onto them and these larger petards will create the big radials of the previous game, but you'll need a glove power-up first as per the old rules. Speaking of, you also need the kick power-up to boot explosives towards enemies and the remote bomb is here as always if you're lucky enough to find it. If anything, the remote makes things too easy: the first boss fight I had, against a fire dude calling himself Baelfael (also what it's called when you are unable to escape a fight in a RPG), actually went out of its way to disable the remote bomb power-up to keep things fair. Speaking of whom, I was in said boss fight just before the timer went off and accidentally wandered into the moat (actually a sewer) around the fight arena and instantly died, so I'll be in a rematch the moment this next segment begins.
32 Minutes In
Wow. What are the odds.
Baelfael has faeled his last bael and shortly after we are introduced to Lilith who, in a twist I find slightly uncomfortable, looked like a normal human being but with Bomberman proportions. Evidently Bomberman wasn't as put off by this uncanny Funko valley business as I was because he was soon head over heels despite some very suspicious behavior from the moment this heroine suddenly appeared, chief of which being that the game introduced her as "Lilith, the Scourge of the Starways". Nope, no red flags being raised here. After that, we're told what our next objective will be after feeding bombs to the local boss: we have to destroy the gravity generator that's at the center of this artificial planet we're on, and doing so will allow us to escape and hopefully not also destroy the planet and kill everyone on it. Well, not that I haven't been doing a fine job of that already as I make my way through this gross-looking sewer-base. I just entered said generator room when the timer pinged again.
I found some mysterious (and well-hidden) capsules while playing and I suspect these are the multiplayer cosmetic items that were also very carefully concealed in Bomberman 64 too. One involved reaching a secret room in the moat of that boss fight (once I'd removed the water, of course) and the second required setting up a bunch of remote bombs that I could hop across to clear a gap: the two strategies most of the cosmetic hunts in the previous game required also. I don't think I'll go collectible crazy this time around, but these things do tend to require more puzzle-solving than the regular gameplay loop provides (which involves way fewer puzzles and way more explosions) so I might find myself distracted from time to time regardless.
48 Minutes In
Great, Regulus is back, except now he's calling himself Bulzeeb and is somehow even more of an edgelord. Everyone needs their own Shadow the Hedgehog I guess.
The gravity generator room was just a gauntlet to remove a bunch of shield generators protecting the target, then blowing up said target. Plenty of enemies to fight but it didn't seem necessary to go after them: however, since some of the shield generators needed some platforming nuance to reach it seemed prudent to clear out any nearby enemies first rather than let them interfere. I figured I'd be timed in some way—like the shield generators come back online after a minute or so—but there was nothing that demanding. Might be something they introduce for the later ones though. After that we were treated to one of those "all the bad guys have a meeting to let you know who is who" cutscenes and then we had access to the world map, which gives you two options: the ocean planet or the wind planet. The shop is also available on the world map, so I made sure to buy a health upgrade as well as a couple of cosmetic items with my remaining change. Oddly, the first item up for sale was Wario's moustache. I guess Wario Blast established they inhabited the same universe? Last, as soon as we touched down on the ocean planet (which is called Aquanet, so I hope Hudson cleared that with the hairspray people) Pommy, the disturbing little gremlin that he is, evolved into "Knuckle Pommy" based on all the random food items I kept picking up in the previous world. Won't make much of a difference to me though, as I'll explain below.
So, let's talk about Pommy's role in the game. Far as I can tell he's one of those asymmetric co-op additions like Tails in Sonic 2 that you can let your skill-deficient kid, younger sibling, or partner control since he (she? they?) is effectively immortal. Too many cooks is definitely a factor in any Bomberman when you're dropping explosives all over the place though, so I'm not sure how helpful it is to have two of you causing mayhem given how relatively narrow these rooms can be. The Pommy evolutions, which I'm sure have some sort of hidden logic to how you activate them, will change Pommy's attributes or give them new attacks. Since I've no second player around to test these mechanics on Pommy's just been hanging out so far, though they make it a point to go hide and cower during boss fights (presumably as, much like in Sonic 2, they can become a tad too easy with an invincible helper—same reason for taking the remotes away).
64 Minutes In
Aquanet has a bunch of water-level lowering puzzles, as you might expect from any N64 water temple level. It's usually pretty obvious where the water's coming from if you need to stop the flow.
I spent this last segment exploring Aquanet, which was probably a poor second choice given how much of this world involves eluding the high water levels or else dying instantly. At one point I broke a wall barricade which had a whole bunch of water rush in on the level I was standing; I figured as soon as the cutscene was over I'd immediately drown, but fortunately it was only waist-high. Bombs don't work great in the water as you might surmise and this world had a whole bunch of annoying enemies, including crabs that sap you of power-ups if their bubbles hit you and seals that will take any nearby bomb and pick it up and throw it back at you like they were playing fetch. Worst of all was Pommy giving Bomberman shit every five minutes about not being able to swim; fortunately, once you have the glove power-up you can also pick Pommy up and throw it into, let's say, a large body of water. Let's see how buoyant you are, you furry Kirby knock-off.
Truth be told I had a pretty good time here. The worlds feel like they have more personality to them than in the previous game, fitting not only the aesthetics around the current theme but also enemies and puzzles too. A 3D map of the world that's visible on the pause screen gives you some idea of where you're going, if not always a clear route, but the game's been fairly straightforward so it's probably not a major factor. Again, gotta assume if there's map tech involved that the worlds are going to start getting a bit more non-linear and complex to navigate before too long. Either way, though it backtracks on the divisive ingenuity of Bomberman 64 for the sake of being a watered-down hybrid, I can't say I found The Second Attack all that disagreeable. I'm sure there's a major component of the Bomberman fandom that still wonders why these games bother with single-player campaigns in the first place.
How Well Has It Aged?: There Wasn't a Third Attack For a Reason. Eh, it's fine. It's Bomberman. Hard to screw up Bomberman too badly, especially when you play it safe like this one. Usual assortment of robot villains to explode one after the other and outside of that you're spending your time destroying parts of the environment for power-ups and hidden buttons/exits. Bomberman level design always seems to start and end with "what if Zelda but he stopped getting new items after the bombs, because what else do you really need at that point?" as a philosophy, and I can't say it's not a sound one.
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Konami. Been a while since our last Konami game and those pachinko fiends continue to be unpredictable when it comes to licensing their back catalog. Recently they've been busy putting new Silent Hill, Metal Gear, Contra, and (of course) Bomberman games into production so they've certainly been making an effort but I still don't think they're invested enough to dig up their old N64 games and make those available again, especially with the poor reputation of the N64 Castlevanias and experiments like Hybrid Heaven. My hope that they localize all the Ganbare Goemon games in one compilation continues to look sadly improbable.
Retro Achievements Earned: 2 (out of 50). Most of these are highly conditional, arbitrary stuff that you wouldn't think of doing if there wasn't an achievement attached to it. Like dropping a remote bomb on all four pillars in the arena that hosts the Baelfael fight. There's also a large number reserved for the Pommy transformations, so that's probably going to require a few playthroughs and a guide open nearby.
History: Mahjong 64 is a relatively barebones and straightforward mahjong simulator that was released early in the platform's lifespan in Japan only. Its framing device is that you're at a school for mahjong and must complete the curriculum to graduate, earning enough credits from mahjong victories to pass from one grade to the next—this includes competing with fellow students as well as learning how to play the game more effectively. Despite the simple name suggesting it got there first, it was actually the second mahjong game to be released on N64 after Konami's Mahjong Master (released the previous December) out of a total of seven mahjong games for the system. It's also the second mahjong game we've covered on here after Imagineer's Mahjong Hourouki Classic from Episode 34, but don't hold your breath on me "finishing the set".
Publishers Koei were best known at this time for their strategy simulation franchises like Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sangokushi) and Nobunaga's Ambition (Nobunaga no Yabou), none of which ever saw a N64 release. They would in fact only publish two games for the system: this and Operation: WinBack, a third-person shooter that was developed by their subsidiary Omega Force (the musou guys) which has the distinction of being the first third-party game to be included in the Switch Online N64 library. Mahjong 64 would also be Chat Noir's sole N64 game: these contract developers almost exclusively made mahjong games for whomever would pay them.
You know what they say about bad luck and black cats crossing your path and here's that aphorism in action with Mahjong 64, possibly the dullest-looking N64 game I've yet encountered. I got drowsy just looking at the box art, despite the spiky action bubble. That said, I can at least handle mahjong unlike shogi or hanafuda so I don't imagine I'll be completely lost over the next hour even with the language barrier. Maybe I'll find some way to make this interesting to read about? Doesn't seem like the random chooser app wants to help my SEO any, but I suppose there are worse things they could've saddled me with. So many worse things. In fact, let's stop talking before I give it too many ideas.
16 Minutes In
Mahjong's a very involved game where almost every combination of tiles has its own name. This particular hand is called 'trash'.
Wow, this... sure is mahjong all right. After getting through a few preliminary menus where you contribute a name and gender (the text input was almost interesting: rather than give you separate keyboards for hiragana, katakana, and romaji they just had the hiragana set and then had you choose which character you actually meant from a separate menu, including dakuons. Like I said, almost interesting) I'm dropped on a map screen of the mahjong school campus and left to figure out which one will take me to a mahjong game. Fortunately, it was the building on the cursor's default starting position and it didn't take long until I was slapping down tiles like the best of 'em.
I wasn't sure what approach this game was going to have with its school framing gimmick, like whether it was one of those "puzzle" mode type of variations you might see for games like chess or shogi where the board is set up in a mid-game state and you're told that you can checkmate in three moves if you know what you're doing. Perhaps those would be the "lessons" to help you get better at judging what type of yaku to aim for or what would be the more reliable, safer option. Something like a thirteen orphans hand would be nice and all, but maybe not worth sacrificing a fail-safe like a meld of dragons. I'm sure this all sounds like gibberish to a non-mahjong type, but I'm often curious about the intentions of a mahjong game developer when the playing field is already stacked with so many identical sims already; you'd hope they're not just trying to coast along by putting out a cheap adaptation of a board game enough people are into that it's guaranteed to sell at least reasonably well, but maybe I'm expecting too much creativity and ambition from a game literally called "Mahjong 64". Well, even if this game is as basic as it comes, I can at least spend an hour playing regular mahjong without issue. Hell, I've done it often enough in any given Like a Dragon playthrough.
32 Minutes In
As is often the case, a good hand in mahjong might be worth even more than you anticipated. I knew I'd get points for having a hand that was all-simples, all-pons, and had three sets in different suits of the same number (4), but I didn't realize this would be worth 8 han in total. That extremely smug expression my character is making is well-earned.
Not much to report, I'm still in the same game I was in before though with that last hand I may have secured victory. I finally figured out what button it was to acknowledge an opportunity—what happens in mahjong games is that an opponent discards a tile that starts flashing, which is the game prompting you to take action by taking that discard into your own hand. There are various reasons why you'd want (or not want) to do this that I won't go into here but I'd been trying every button to make the menu pop up that would tell me what I could do with that discarded tile, and it turns out the magic button was down on the Control Stick. I guess because your position is always the southern player (positionally at least, if not in how the cardinal directions play a role in mahjong since those switch every round) there's some intuitive sense in that but, I mean, you have two main face buttons right there: just have one to confirm that you want to leave the discard where it is, and the other to take it for your hand. Simple enough, right? Whatever, I figured it out before it cost me a ron (i.e. the "I win" button) so it's all good in the hood. The mahjong hood.
Let's talk aesthetics. The game's characters are fairly unappealing because someone decided to use pre-rendered CG rather than sprites and there's this polygonal hand model that is used whenever a player places down tiles (and has male and female versions) which feels like a needlessly expensive indulgence given it doesn't look too hot either. However, the tiles themselves appear nice enough with their little shadows and the music's been surprisingly fun: there's a whole bunch of tracks I've heard so far, and while they're the typical jazzy and/or Chinese restaurant musak you'd find in any mahjong adaptation like this I'm surprised there's so many of them. I imagine what's actually the case is that there's a distinct BGM for each "wind": once you hear South playing, for instance, that's a simple but effective indicator that you're currently South. Could also just be instead that they composed a whole bunch of VGM for this and wanted to use it. Now, if only I could keep the kanji for the four winds straight... (I remember East is the tripod-looking one since East is usually the most important, but I confuse the other three all the time.)
48 Minutes In
The results of the first match. Kinda figured we'd all be highschoolers given the setting, but there's no '21 Jump Street' universe where the guy on the right can pass off as a student. Even Steve Buscemi carrying two skateboards would be more convincing.
Somehow, the player that I scored a ron against in the previous segment was able to keep on playing with negative points so we finished that game with me ahead and I earned a certain amount of currency that I imagine goes towards my mahjong GPA or something. A menu popped up and I chose the top option and I was back to playing the same group again, so I hope it was "rematch" and not "restart" since I'm never going to be that lucky again. Then again, it's not like progress is all that important considering I'll never play a second more of this game once the sixty-four minutes are through, but there's always that slight pang of regret whenever you feel like you may have accidentally wiped your own progress.
Boy howdy, I wish I had more to say about this perfectly anodyne mahjong game. A few observations behind the odd way this game handles riichi, then. Riichi, after which the Japanese style of Riichi Mahjong is named, is a move you can do when you only need one tile to complete your hand and you've yet to reveal any part of it (which you'd need to do if you wanted someone's discarded tile). You're basically boasting to the table that you're on the cusp of winning and doing so gives you bonus points once you do win, but the drawback is that it costs 1,000 points (out of your starting total of 25,000) to declare riichi and if someone else wins those points are lost forever (though they do get returned if the game's a draw). What's different here is that in most mahjong games once you've gone riichi the game puts you into auto-pilot, automatically ditching any tiles that isn't the one (or one of the ones) you need to win: here, you still have to manually discard tiles as usual, so evidently that QoL convenience hadn't become mainstream yet. The other thing I want to say about riichi is that the player's unsightly polygonal hand always whips out the riichi stick—like an ante you throw in to let folks know riichi just happened—in a super flamboyant way, like you're some kind of badass card shark. Tile shark. Whatever the mahjong version would be. It makes those occasions when you don't win after such a showboat declaration that much more clownish in retrospect.
64 Minutes In
And so, we end this playthrough in much the same manner as how we started: with basically nothing going on in this dumb hand. Who the hell needs one of each wind?
Well, things didn't go quite so well for me this time. In one round I declared riichi right after the dude on my right, who then immediately countered my riichi with a ron, which in common parlance would be a "sit your ass right back down" move. Not only did I get dinged for his moderately strong hand but winning in the round immediately after you called riichi is worth additional han (it's called ippatsu, or "one shot"). The only wins I managed to pull out in this second match were a few single-han (the ol' han solo) wiener victories so I'm glad this last segment ended before I had to face the music for my failure. They can't flunk me if I drop out of school early. That's just math. (Man, I'm saying "riichi" so much it's starting to look like a foreign word.)
So that's that. An hour of mahjong. Exciting stuff, but as I said at the head there's worse ways I could've spent this time and I'm sure the random chooser app will discover one just in time for next month's episode. I don't play enough mahjong games to know if this one was much better or worse than what was already available, but I can't say it left a particularly positive impression overall. The wind indicator never seemed to move much—more that it indicated what the table wind was, not what everyone's current round wind was, which is a mahjong jargon sentence I'm not sure even I understand—and I mentioned that missing riichi QoL feature before, which is probably one archaic design choice of many. I think it could've used a bit more visual pizazz besides its creepy CG marionette hands or at least leaned into its school gimmick a bit more by having Persona-style teen drama between rounds instead of it being just a bunch of adult learning seniors going to a highschool annex to be taught mahjong, which isn't the kind of glamorous vibe I want from a gambling-adjacent parlor game like this.
How Well Has It Aged?: As Well as This Ojiisan Sitting on My Right. I don't think there's much call for dedicated mahjong games unless they're part of a bigger whole such as in Like a Dragon or they're something designed to quickly match you with other humans like a Mahjong Soul type of mobile gacha thing. Plus, the tech has probably improved quite significantly since 1997 (which, as I'm sure you need no reminders about, was almost 30 years ago).
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Nah-jong. There's no universe where Koei Tecmo decides to dedicate any amount of time they could be musou-ing to reviving this for Switch Online. That said, if Nioh 3 has a mahjong mode in it where winning could grant you a bunch of colored loot or a new collectible tea kettle I wouldn't be at all shocked.
Continuing this trend of being incidentally relevant—this IGotW's game was, until yesterday, also the weekly freebie for the Epic Games Store—we have the extremely slick first-person "acrobatic kill" simulator Ghostrunner from studios One More Level and Slipgate Ironworks, a game with high enough production values that I'll probably get figuratively slapped by those who take umbrage at anything being called "Indie" once it passes beyond a certain budgetary level (OK, fine, it's also published by 3D Realms which is owned by Saber Interactive which was, at the time, fully Embraced, so sue me). Truly, I care deeply for such distinctions. Ghostrunner sees the player as the last member of the titular peacekeeping force that were betrayed and slaughtered almost to a man after Mara, the Keymaster, staged a coup against the ruler and architect of the last urban metropolis standing tall in a post-apocalyptic world. With no Gatekeeper around to keep the Keymaster in check, it's down to the very last of these Ghostrunners to repair their broken circuitry, recover all their flashy moves, and take the fight to Mara to avenge their fallen kin and save the city from her tyranny.
Ghostrunner mostly splits its time between first-person parkour platforming business and tough battles where a single shot from even the weakest (yet remarkably accurate) enemies is enough to finish you off. You're quickly taught your main skill—a mid-air dash that can slow time temporarily when held down, useful for dodging bullets last-second and swooping in for the kill with your katana—and eventually acquire more as the game proceeds, each with their own cooldowns. Platforming might involve grappling to points in the environment, running across walls, sliding under gaps or down slopes to build speed, and using the dash to clear the gaps you can't quite manage with your normal jumps alone. There's a certain alacrity to the game that, like with all the best masocore games, will quickly respawn you after any death so as to not disturb the rapid pace it wants to maintain.
Nice of this dude to just glitch-freeze in this posthumous pose so I could take a picture. Oh wait, I wasn't going to mention it. Nah, this shot was all my incredible timing.
Speaking of which, I have died a lot so far. It has yet to deter me, but it can be a bit aggravating in situations where you might need to clear a whole room of enemies and there's no mid-spree checkpointing available. However, most of the time the enemy groups are small enough that you breeze right through and the platforming, though certainly not easy, doesn't feel anywhere near as stringent. What has occurred to me, and often, is that I just need to improve at the game's combat, using all the options available to juke around enemies and move in closer for the kill without just sprinting right at them like a buffoon. What's been helping immensely is an upgrade I acquired—there's a whole of bunch of these, incidentally, but they use a Tetris grid system that restricts how many you can equip at once—where I can just reflect bullets back at enemies by swinging at them with perfect timing. Naturally, this isn't foolproof (and nor am I bulletproof) especially now that goons with machine guns have shown up but it often means I don't have to be so cagey when there's too much open distance between me and my would-be murderer. As long as I get that timing right, anyway. As I've progressed, I've found more upgrades and new abilities and the limited upgrade system means I can figure out which of those abilities operate the best with my playstyle and just double-down on what's effective. Even early on it was invigorating with its sense of speed and style, but as I continue to fine-tune the game to my own specifications I'm finding that I'm enjoying it that much more as I play.
But man, does this game look good. I've had this new system for just over a year now but I'm always skittish about taxing that cute little 3060 GPU of mine so I've not been playing anything too high-spec just in case, but the moderate buzzing (not quite whirry enough to be worrisome) means it's getting plenty of exercise trying to maintain this very pretty game at the prohibitively-high framerate such a gaming experience demands. It's one of the few games I've played since getting the new system where I couldn't even imagine my PS4 handling it at this level of graphical fidelity, let alone my previous PC which was maybe just about powerful enough to run a calculator app provided I didn't give it any long division to do. I'm gearing up a May-long feature that will test its mettle against all the games I couldn't previously get to run so this will be a good warm-up for that.
202 deaths? Oh, is that all? Good thing this was only the fourth level...
So yeah, even as annoyingly difficult as Ghostrunner can be I'm finding I'm enjoying my time with it quite a bit. There's always that compulsion with hard games to shake off every failure because you know the eventual victory will be all the sweeter for the struggle, and the key to making that work is to make said inevitable failure as painless as possible; to make it extremely easy to get up, dust yourself off, and jump back into the fray by making restarts near-instantaneous and without forcing you to recover too much lost ground. The large melees against up to tens of opponents are the only big hurdles that have slowed down progress to an unsatisfactory level, but for the most part it's just a rollercoaster of cool moves and grisly takedowns and it feels great when you're in that flow and things are going swell. Worth pushing past that awkward start when I was dying too much from not being able to follow the game's timbre because now I'm having a blast with it. Curious to see how it (and my opinion on it) will change throughout its full trajectory; I'll be sure to supply a post-playthrough addendum as always if things shift one way or the other.
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Post-Playthrough Edit: Well, as predicted Ghostrunner got much better as it went on between all the new powers and the new enemies to take apart (I liked the sword dudes) but man did that final boss stink so let's just call it even and keep it at a 4 out of 5. Though the cyberpunk tropes are all stuff we've seen a dozen times before the sheer amount of style combined with the slick maneuvering and one-shot, one-kill combat (for both sides) meant it was greatly entertaining throughout; one that rewarded inventive approaches to problems when applicable. My per-stage death count even stopped being in the triple figures after the review went up, such was the game's careful tutelage of its mechanics. I'm very much done with the game after that horrific last gauntlet, but I'd certainly be interested in finding out what Ghostrunner 2 has to offer someday.
Swannichiwa, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Anyway, Here's WonderSwan. Like all ugly ducklings, I've always regarded swans with a sense of wonderment but could never be one (I think that's how the story goes) so getting up and close with (a virtual approximation of) Bandai's WonderSwan has been nothing if not eye-opening. We're three entries into this feature now and I've plenty of WS games I still want to check out and plenty more besides that I'm sure will be dumped on me to poorly decipher with the extremely limited Japanese at my disposal. Still, much like a jar of those mercurial Jelly Belly jelly beans, you've just gotta take a handful at a time, drop them into a glass of warm milk, and chug down that coagulated mess one labored mouthful at a time. Oh, what, you think there's a better way of eating jelly beans? I'd like to hear it. (Please don't fill the comments with jelly bean consumption tips, I'm just being facetious for the opening bit. It's getting so hard to write these things.)
There are rules to observe but nothing too restrictive: in each entry I have five WonderSwan games chosen for me by a random chooser app that I randomly chose from the several available (see how they like it) and I spent some amount of time with each, delineating what they are, where they're from, who worked on them, and how well the game has held up after twenty years of incremental portable gaming advancements. Since the device was made by Bandai, there's also going to be a higher-than-recommended quota of anime licensed games, so I'll probably talk about those licenses too. Gotta fill that imaginary word count somehow. Last month I sat down the Random Chooser Union to hash out the first of what I hope to be many (personally) beneficial rulings going forward: the "Lucky 7s Clause", which turns every seventh entry into a user-chosen game choice instead of a randomly-determined one. Since we're covering games 11 through 15 this time, that means #14 is our fortunate winner and I've elected to use the opportunity to try out a WonderSwan-exclusive spin-off from a well-regarded (if not particularly busy) platformer franchise from Namco.
If you are just joining us, be sure to check out Part One and Part Two by pressing on the words that are all orange and shit.
Field Report: I should've figured we'd be dealing with a Super Robot Wars game eventually. The system has six of them, for the record, though three appear to be a single game broken up into a trilogy of releases. Banpresto's been making these crossover mecha anime strategy games since the 8-bit era—the first two both released in 1991, for the Game Boy and Famicom (NES) respectively—and this "Compact" version was the tenth overall. This one's actually a remake of the first Super Robot Taisen Compact which released on the standard black & white WonderSwan back in April '99; this release simply colorizes it, though there may be a few other enhancements here and there.
Banpresto was a struggling minor game company called Coreland until Bandai bought a majority share, changed its name to Banpresto (a portmanteau of Bandai and "presto", the magician lingo for making something suddenly appear, perhaps say after only a few months of game development), and had them work on licensed games for properties that Bandai had procured the rights to. Their biggest success by far was Super Robot Wars, which spun off the Compati Hero series of crossovers, to the extent that they often needed contractors like TOSE (the biggest contract game development firm in the world, or certainly the busiest) to meet demand for all those warring little TV mecha.
Most Super Robot Wars games look like this. Grids and icons. Thrilling stuff.I just shot the bejeezus out of this faceless dude. Serves him right for asking to go 'down low' and then suddenly withdrawing his hand. What the hell, man.This is Amuro Ray and his Gundam, currently in the middle of going 'down low' with this high five. If only he knew what villainy awaited him.
SRW is your typical strategy RPG, so that just means moving units around on a map and ganging up on enemies to take them out one at a time. Of course, I've have done a lot better if I could read any of the attack descriptions—most of my units had several to choose from, though more than half were usually greyed out because I didn't fit one condition or another—and I ended up losing a few of my units to some bad luck. One instance had Char Aznable, one of the few Gundam characters I can recognize, take out one of the Gundam protagonists (it wasn't Amuro Ray, but that dude was present) and then decide he'd done enough and just bailed. That first fight then ended shortly after with some kind of floating battleship emerging from the enemy base and all the allied units leaving the map one after the other; I wondered if I lost due to a time limit or some other fail state, but I was given the option to save right after so I guess it was the intended path to complete that map.
Either way, without understanding what's going on, what options I have available, who anybody is, and what anyone is saying to anyone else there's a limited amount of engagement here. It seemed kinda slick, at least? Not to mention the type of session-based RPG that might be perfect for a portable. I'll admit that I'm sorta tempted to find one of the few SRW games that can be played in English to see if I can piece together what the deal is (or just play the second Project X Zone, since it's mostly the same deal).
Time Spent: It took about 30 minutes to clear that one map.
Field Report: Hooray, we have our first Squaresoft game on here. Squaresoft famously stormed away from Nintendo systems after the latter refused to budge on producing a CD-based console, though Square themselves weren't averse to the occasional release on non-optical media: they still had an interest in developing for portables, it turns out, but given their beef with Nintendo they took those ideas to Bandai and WonderSwan instead of Game Boy Color and Advance (if only for a while, in the case of the latter). Blue Wing Blitz is a typically off-beat idea of theirs, one that took their earlier Bahamut Lagoon SFC strategy RPG comprised of mostly winged units fighting over floating islands and then married it to the modern military stylings and vehicle customization of Front Mission (the same team worked on both) to create this game about a colorful group of flying aces taking on missions in their fighter and bomber planes in open rebellion against a technologically-superior expansionist empire (so what else is new for Square?). Each named character has a distinct aircraft and role to play in combat.
I'm not going to explain who Squaresoft are but I do want to confirm my intention of eventually trying out every Squaresoft game they put out on WonderSwan, including all the Final Fantasy and SaGa ports. They published ten in total, seven of which they developed themselves and three of those were unique to this system (Blue Wing Blitz being the third and last of them). In terms of staff we have SaGa creator and all-round game designer oddball Akitoshi Kawazu as the producer, the aforementioned Front Mission team on development, and Kumi Tanioka as the composer. This was actually one of Tanioka's first big solo projects while employed at Square: she'd achieve greater renown through her work on the Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles sub-franchise, almost all of which were solo projects of hers too, before leaving Square and going freelance in 2010.
Each map looks like this. The idea being that up to two allied planes and two enemy planes can dogfight in one 'square' on the map. Makes things more dynamic and exciting when it's suddenly two-against-one.Actual combat is menu-driven, giving you a bunch of maneuvering commands to outfox your opponent. Definitely requires more literacy than most strategy games.Yeah, I ain't fighting this thing. It's got like eight cannons and those are just the ones I can see.
This game is much more complicated than I first anticipated, owing to its focus on aerial combat. There's multiple maneuver types you can employ in addition to your weapon types so dogfights tend to be battles of procuring a superior position over your opponent before swooping in for the kill. It's somewhat intuitive as they give you a tiny action window to help make sense of where you are in relation to the other guy, whether you're currently above or below or chasing or being chased, and you can work out from there which approach will make the most sense. Every "round" includes an attack stage and a damage stage, and the battle ends after four of these exchanges following which you can either fly away or stick around for another assault. The tutorial I played had one rival airplane, a guy that I couldn't seem to beat, before I was instructed to shoot the crap out of a non-hostile stationary ground target (it was a shed) which was much easier. The story then kicked in and the protagonist and what I believe to be his female instructor (and probably future love interest) then had to deal with this enormous war blimp that showed up out of nowhere and started shelling my man's hometown, and I wasn't anywhere near confident enough about my grasp on the game to attempt to shoot it down.
I will say that they definitely thought about how a "Front Mission in the skies" would work, with aerial warfare that would be riveting if I knew how any of it ticked, and the concept of an anime war drama a la Valkyria Chronicles sounds like it might be fun. Going to have to wait until a fan translation appears though, since the mechanics seem a bit too involved to play blind.
Field Report: Guilty Gear Petit is, as you might extrapolate from the name, a compact version of the anime fighter Guilty Gear and the first of two spin-offs that Arc System Works produced for the WonderSwan Color. In the chronology of the series, we're talking halfway between Guilty Gear X and Guilty Gear XX, so maybe like a Guilty Gear X and a Half. It uses a chibi "super deformed" style to make the otherwise elaborate character designs work on a tiny handheld and even features a spin-off-unique fighter in Fanny, a nurse with a connection to Dr. Baldhead (before his atonement arc as Faust) and who fights with a similarly idiosyncratic style.
Arc System Works established themselves as contract developers at first, frequently working with Sammy, Sega, and Bandai (the last of those possibly prompting their presence here) before starting their own original projects like Guilty Gear. Sammy had been and would be the main publisher for the Guilty Gear franchise, at least for the first few years, and that's the case here too. By 2001 Sammy had more or less begun to bow out of video games to focus on their pachinko and pachi-slot enterprises, eventually acquiring and merging with former hardware makers Sega to allow the latter to control the video game portion of their portfolio while they focused on shooting balls around tables. Kind of like if Bakalar merged with Grubb to form a single "SuperJeff" unit where he could just play pinball and leave all the games talk to his more hirsute half. Man, that's a weird mental image right there.
A better look at Fanny and a syringe so massive there's no way it doesn't defy the Hippocratic Oath.Potemkin Buster is definitely strong, but his best special is when he rolls that baby carriage down that huge staircase and absolutely flattens his opponent with it.It's the power of Arc System Works's art team that even on a limited portable system the stages look so vibrant and detailed. Anyway, I'm just going to enjoy this relaxing scene before a thousand dolphins show up.
The default character options are Sol Badguy, Ky Kiske, Potemkin, Millia Rage, May, and new girl Fanny (Jam's in this too, but I guess she's a secret/unlockable character). Like any non-scrub I went for Potemkin and spammed his Potemkin Buster to complete the story mode. It's a really effective move, I'm surprised more Potemkin players don't use it. Actually, I couldn't get the half-circle motion to work and I forgot all his other moves so I just went for normals. Did the job on the default difficulty though: due to Potemkin's enormous reach, only the late-game fights against Jam and Fanny gave me any issues, the latter apparently serving as the boss of the game.
I'm not a fighter guy so getting into individual characters and checking out their meta in the lab didn't really appeal, and the game's like other portable fighters at this time where it felt a bit too streamlined for its own good (I own Street Fighter Alpha 3 for GBA as well, and while remarkably smooth for what it was it didn't hold my interest long either). Plus, I'd want to be to able to read the story if I'm taking on that mode with the other characters. Got some RetroAchievements out of it at least.
(I couldn't tell you what the smell of this game was. Maybe a pepperjack cheese mixed with fresh grass cuttings?)
Time Spent: That story completion run took 12 minutes and I've opted to retire on top.
Field Report: Kaze no Klonoa: Moonlight Museum ("Kaze no Klonoa" simply meaning "Klonoa of the Wind", the franchise's Japanese title) is a portable spin-off of everyone's favorite... cat... boy... rabbit... thing? from Namco, Klonoa. It was released right in-between the two main games—1997's Klonoa: Door to Phantomile for the PlayStation and 2001's Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil for PS2—and was the first of several portable Klonoa spin-offs. Moonlight Museum looks and plays much like its GBA successors Empire of Dreams and Dream Champ Tournament (albeit with fewer colors): the game ditches the "2.5D" visual gimmick of the core games and switches the focus from action to puzzle-platforming, dropping you into maze-like levels and having you figure your way out. Moonlight Museum's basic plot has Klonoa and his flying companion Huepow (I guess they met up again?) visit the titular institution to track down missing fragments of the moon: a bunch of eccentric artists took them to spruce up their creations, and now Klonoa has to enter the worlds of those artworks to recover the fragments. (Jumping into portraits to be whisked off to magical worlds was a big thing in platformers at the time, what can I say?)
And so we meet Namco proper on this feature. We had a tangential encounter through Final Lap Special (#009), which was a spin-off of a Namco arcade racing franchise developed by a third party, but for this original Klonoa entry they showed up in person. Persons. People. Pretty sure Namco is more than one guy, anyway. Namco would eventually develop five games for the WonderSwan, each of which was a unique(ish) entry in a pre-existing franchise of theirs: seems they weren't averse to developing on the platform, but maybe weren't going to take any big risks with a new IP either. In total, they developed a WonderSwan game each for Klonoa, Tekken, Famista, Kosodate Quiz: My Angel, and Mr. Driller. I know which one of those I'd prefer to try out next (and it's totally the Japanese-language trivia game about raising a daughter).
The artists are a kooky lot, but Klonoa never resorts to throwing hands with them. In fact, there are no boss fights whatsoever.This puzzle involves throwing the block to the right (it travels until it hits a wall) to stop the wind turbine, then using the floating ball to double-jump your way over to the pointy star thing. Typical enough puzzle and thankfully one that doesn't incur any risk to my catperson (or to my achievement chances, crucially).Some stages have you swap the orientation to Portrait Mode, usually those of a more vertical persuasion. WonderSwan kinda pre-empted a lot of smartphone gaming, huh. Well, except I haven't seen any gacha games yet.
As in all the other games, Klonoa's main skill is a "wind bullet" that allows him to carry inflated enemies and toss them around: not only does this temporarily put the enemy out of commission but you can throw them at switches to activate them or leap off them in mid-air for a double-jump. Klonoa can also do the same for certain blocks, which won't be destroyed when thrown/leapt off. Most of the puzzles revolve around this technique, as well as special qualities of certain enemies—the "boomies", for example, will explode after a certain amount of time which can be useful for destroying barriers—or stage hazards and features, the latter including things like vertical wind flues that push you towards the ceiling unless you block them. It's a pretty inventive game, usually introducing at least one new mechanic in each of its 36 normal stages (there's also six ultra-hard "EX" stages that unlock in the post-game). The loop of each stage is to find three moon fragments and head to the exit, though there's the optional goal of finding 30 smaller gems found either as tiny diamonds worth one each or larger crystals worth five. Despite slowing me down quite a bit, I've been pursuing the Retro Achievements set for the game which requires you to complete every stage with all gems and without getting hurt: it started getting a lot tougher around World 4 due to the number of annoying enemies to deal with.
This is the first WonderSwan game covered so far that I felt compelled to finish, in part because it never stopped being surprising and in part because I got that completionist tick burrowing into my skull. Right now I just have the EX levels to tackle, but the whole "no damage" thing might be a dealbreaker so I'll leave those for another day. On the whole the game wasn't that taxing, even with the all the bonus requirements foisted upon me by the RA set, but it was a pretty solid base for the portable Klonoa games going forward. Puzzle games have always been the best genre for this format, after all, so it made sense to double-down on that aspect rather than try for the spectacle of the PS1/PS2 games which a black and white handheld was in no shape to replicate. Glad I decided to do a deeper dive on this lesser-known Klonoa and here's hoping the WonderSwan has some other games of a similar caliber. (Speaking of which, I bought that Phantasy Reverie remake compilation a little while ago so I should probably get around to booting it up.)
Time Spent: It took around six hours to roll credits.
Inscrutability: Minor, unless you don't know how to play these board games.
Is This Anime?: Pretty boring anime if it was.
Field Report: Well, this should be a short one. Gomoku Narabe and Reversi are the two games you can play on a Go board that aren't Go. They're both much simpler than Go too, at least in terms of figuring out what to do if not in figuring out how to be better at it than your opponent, so they're well-liked by kids. In Gomoku Narabe the goal is to make a straight line of five tiles while blocking your opponent's attempts to do the same, and in Reversi (also known as Othello) you place tiles on either side of an opponent's piece to flip it to your color with the goal being to have the most tiles when the board is full. Sammy put out three of these "Touryuumon"—which means gateway, in a metaphorical sense of a barrier to overcome—board game adaptations for WonderSwan and this is the third and last, following Mahjong Touryuumon and Shogi Touryuumon.
I've already dropped some lore above about Sammy's status as a developer in the early '00s, but I'll add to that by saying that they published eight games for the WonderSwan in total and four of those they developed themselves. Those eight include all three of these Touryuumon games and the two Guilty Gear Petit fighters; the others include the two strategy games Anchorz Field and Armored Unit as well as Nice On, one of only two golf games for the system.
More like a Rever-sea of black pieces. Which are my pieces. CPU choked harder than Desdemona (too soon).The classic trap is to create a chain like this but leave the middle out, in case the other player doesn't connect it visually themselves. Well, two can play at this game (literally the case for Gomoku).Damn, you rule of three. I thought you only applied to Nintendo bosses, not here too.
The one Reversi game I played resulted in a resounding victory over the default CPU level, so most of my time was focused instead on the Gomoku mode which the CPU was way better at. In fact, I couldn't beat it once. Half the time the CPU managed to outfox me by creating an "open" row of four—that is, a row that doesn't have either end blocked off—which in Gomoku terms is basically "checkmate in one move" and unsurviveable. The other half of the time I kept falling afoul of some odd rule that I couldn't read. A little bit of research later and I realized the game was actually playing under the Renju ruleset, which prohibits the black player (who always goes first, in a reversal of the chess standard) from making certain moves as they'll have too much of an advantage otherwise. The one I kept running into was the "three and three" rule, which prohibits the black player from creating two open rows of three tiles as I guess that makes it too easy to follow up with a win. After a few of those, I elected to change the player settings so that the CPU was always black instead and I didn't have to worry about triggering any of those mysterious penalties again, but I still couldn't squeeze out a win.
Truth be told, I've only become a little more interested in Gomoku recently due to watching the vtuber Sakura Miko lose miserably against her fellow Hololive members despite having more practice with the game; it's become one of her more fan-beloved running goofs of late. Anyway, these two board game sims seem perfunctory but entirely disposable, perhaps best suited for pass-and-play with a sibling in the middle of a family road trip. I doubt they would keep my attention for too long but at least I have zero linguistic issues playing them. Maybe I'll get more out of that mahjong one?
Time Spent: 5 minutes on Reversi and 15 on Gomoku for a total of 20 minutes.
Welcome to an unprecedented episode of Indie Game of the Week. The unprecedented part isn't the genre—it's another 2D explormer RPG, sure, but I'll say the tone is very different to last week's Salt and Sacrifice—but rather that I managed to actually get the stars to align for once: I'd been putting off Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising for a while due to my usual procrastinating over RPGs but then I somehow remembered that the big anticipated game this was meant to be promoting as a sort of short-form prologue hype-builder (think Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon to Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night) is actually due out in a matter of days. In other words, this is my most SEO-tastic IGotW in a long while. Hell, I might even get comments on this one, that's how present and zeitgeist-y it feels. Of course, the subject of this entry itself came out two years back, but no-one's ever accused me of punctuality.
So, what is Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, and what specifically is Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising in relation to it? The former was pitched (via its Kickstarter) as a Suikoden-like, or perhaps a "Pseudkoden" if you're an incorrigible punhound with nothing of the filter that allows most wordplay fans to seamlessly integrate into society. It's not just an Indie homage either (like, say, Citizens of Earth) but rather a spiritual successor by Suikoden's own original creator Yoshitaka Murayama. A curious coincidence is that Murayama left Konami before Suikoden III was completed, and if the trailers for Hundred Heroes suggest anything it's that it takes after 3 specifically with its triple protagonist format, one of which speaks for a nature-loving tribe in a shamanistic role and another as an ennobled knight with conflicting goals borne from loyalty, duty, and doing the right thing. Maybe he didn't like the direction Konami was taking his version of 3? I mean, they did add an angry duck-person called Sgt. Joe, and who'd want to see that happen to their baby? Anyway, we'll find out if Hundred Heroes is going to be a contender in an already busy year for RPGs once it arrives on the 24th.
I took this because I wanted a shot of being showered in gold coins while beating up gargoyles, which is most of this game in a nutshell. The damage number was just a nice coincidence.
Its "prologue" Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising, conversely, doesn't feel like a Suikoden at all. It has just the three playable characters and is a 2D action-RPG with a slight explormer edge, blocking off areas in dungeons until you have the right gear or abilities to break through their barriers. If anything, it immediately recalls the likes of Valkyrie Profile (another underappreciated PS1 franchise) and more recent Indie homages like Indivisible, but I'd put it closer to that Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin game that came out a few years back or the 2D Vanillaware RPG-brawlers like Muramasa or Odin Sphere. There's an emphasis on combination attacks to soften up foes or apply a lot of heat very quickly once a boss is in a temporarily vulnerable state, and these combos tend to include your whole roster (hence the Valkyrie Profile comparison) each of whom get a dedicated face button for their attacks. A typical example might involve you air juggling a foe with your heavyset character Garoo, followed by a multi-hit mid-air blade combo with your flighty rogue type CJ, and then finishing it off with ranged attacks as the enemy flies backwards with the magic-user third character (who is, I guess, a mild spoiler). The combat isn't particularly elaborate though it has an alacrity to it which is greatly appreciated if you're just mowing down small fry because you're out there farming drops or chasing down an alternative path in an early dungeon that you've only now acquired the means to access. Tougher enemies and bosses can be juggled as easily as anything else but tend to hit a lot harder to compensate; they require a mote more caution before you go whizzing through knives akimbo. I will say though that the combat can be oddly stiff sometimes. Often I might hit another (that is, not the currently active) character's attack button only for them to show up and just stand there; it's like the game sometimes chooses to have that button be only "bring the dude out" rather than "and then have the dude attack", and it's easy to mess up combos and get smacked in the face when it's being all mercurial like that.
The dungeoneering in Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising's case is mostly in service to its town-building aspect and vice versa. You spend a significant (I'm talking 70-80%) of the playtime doing sidequests for the townsfolk of the frontier settlement of New Neveah. Each rewards a stamp on protagonist CJ's card like she was saving up for a free cup of coffee: the game makes it clear early on that the card/stamp system was a test designed to screen new wandering adventurers to see if they had the town's best interests in mind before they were allowed to run roughshod on the local dungeon, the Runebarrows, but CJ grows to like it so much that she gets increasingly unhinged about collecting stamps from everyone she meets no matter how big the task they have. It largely serves as a means to reward you for excessive sidequesting, most of which involves walking two screens and talking to the right guy and then walking back to the sponsor. Others want easily found resources from the nearby dungeons, from basic construction materials like lumber and stone to precious ores, meal ingredients, monster drops, or items dropped only from specific boss fights (almost all of which are repeatable). The SQs worth doing are those that improve the local vendors, increasing their stock of items or upgrading their services. There's plenty of them: weapons, armor, accessories, meals, potions, item storage, tools for resource collecting, bartering your resources for better ones, and an inn that provides baths that can provide you with a day-long buff to stats, experience gain, or your item encounter rate (it goes away whenever you rest to restore the party's HP to full).
For whatever reason the game lets you rename your weapon once you've upgraded it for the first time, but only through a limited number of provided prompts like it was a Dark Souls player note. Still, while 'Finger But Hole' wasn't available I was at least able to call it this. Pour one out for the King.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is the type of game that is somewhat svelte in both its runtime and the amount it actually has to offer in terms of a loop and a progression. You're mostly going back and forth from the town and dungeons to complete SQs and purchase upgrades until you feel secure enough to follow the main story progression and the tougher fights in store. The chill village-development vibe sometimes puts the game closer to an Atelier or Rune Factory in terms of tone and pace, which was probably a smart choice if this was meant to be a brief aperitif; one that wasn't ever going to offer a lengthy RPG experience to sink your teeth into, unlike the full game for which it's ostensibly out there driving up hype. Visually it's an attractive enough game though I've never really taken to that paper doll animation approach, and the UI is clean and easy to navigate with plenty of fast travel options and other conveniences. The auto-save isn't exactly generous—it seems to occur only after completing major story quests, not sidequests, so you might want to manually save often if you're just out there farming for a new weapon upgrade or some such optional side-trek—but it's not a particularly challenging game given how there's little chance of wandering into a high-level area you weren't prepared for what with all the explormer-style giant rocks, long gaps, and color-coded barricades keeping you out of those danger zones like nature's bouncers. One could argue that it's hopelessly repetitive even with the constant influx of new upgrades (which are quickly cycled out due to the game's relatively compact form), but to that effect it's also a game that's always giving you plenty to be getting on with. "It's got a lot of busywork" might not work as a positive for most yet all the same I'm kinda enthralled by its modest charms with its speedy, Ys-like combat being enough of a hook to keep everything afloat. No idea what, if anything, from this game will be relevant to the final product—unless there's some centuries-long timeskip involved, I could certainly see one or all three of your playable characters showing up in Hundred Heroes as well, especially since they've a hundred slots to fill—but a relaxing if farm-heavy RPG does hit the spot occasionally, especially if that spot happens to drop a lot of ores and gemstones whenever it's hit.
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Post-Playthrough Edit: Well, the game is definitely better towards the end than it was at the start, mostly due to all the new abilities you pick up throughout the game. Protagonist CJ becomes a whirling tempest of slice-y death towards the end, and there's a real fun post-game accessory you can get that makes every hit a critical, with the concomitant dramatic "blaow!" sound effect and screen shake. So that's fun. Reminded of me of stomping around Bloodstained as a ludicrously overpowered Miriam. The whole game's loop of farming in dungeons for resources doesn't ever really abate, but with the fast travel options almost every one of the game's ~130 sidequests takes seconds to complete. Clearly padded to all heck, but what choice did the game have when its world is that comparatively small? Hopefully Hundred Heroes has had more time in the oven to find a better content/time-consumption ratio.
Welcome back, all you Sega crazies and CDs nuts, to another update to Mega Archive CD: a chronological look at the Sega CD/Mega-CD library as I work on sprucing up their Giant Bomb wiki pages. We've passed Halloween '93 in the standard Mega Archive series so now it's time to do the same for our reflective friends in Mega Archive CD. This group of nine has everything you've come to expect from the Sega CD: FMV abominations, RPGs with fancy anime cutscenes, slightly improved ports of Mega Drive originals, and several licensed games.
Now that the Mega Drive is almost all EA sports games these days, I'm finding myself anticipating working on new entries for Mega Archive CD that much more. Too bad it received less than a quarter as many games as the Genesis did. Speaking of which, we'll be back on the November holiday grind for Mega Drive next month: we've got some real doozies coming up.
Be sure to check in on and follow the Mega Archive Mega Spreadsheet for past (and future) MD and SCD games covered here, which I'm happy to report can now be viewed by other people. Boy, Google Docs sure can be fun sometimes.
Premise: A prince of a fantasy kingdom is about to marry his betrothed when the wedding is suddenly raided by anachronistic power-suited foes, whom kill the prince's parents and kidnap his new wife, forcing him to recruit a ragtag group of warriors to get her back. Any RPG that starts the same way as Krull (1983) is already a winner.
Availability: Coincidentally enough, a company named SoMoGa put this out on iOS a decade ago and just a few months back followed it up with an Android port. Seems pretty faithful.
Preservation: The Mega CD's early library included a lot of RPGs, certainly in a greater concentration than the Mega Drive saw at any point, which suggested to me that the early third-party adopters for that system saw an opportunity in the CD format to focus on games that would benefit from more elaborate and dramatic presentations, especially as far as audio is concerned. This was of course something many devs had learned from working with the preceding TurboGrafx-CD and something I believe Squaresoft was very envious about, stuck as they were with whatever exclusivity deal they had with Nintendo and the SNES with its stubborn adherence to cartridges and sound chip music. Vay feels very much like a continuation of that early practice, presenting a pretty traditional RPG experience—less so the story, that posits a scenario where a high-powered, semi-autonomous, sci-fi mech suit crash-lands on a technologically primitive fantasy world and proves to be beyond anyone's abilities to cope with—that was enhanced by what was possible with the optical medium format. Vay then received a typically flippant Working Designs localization, adding levity to an otherwise serious revenge/rescue story: it was the second Sega CD game they worked on after Lunar: The Silver Star, and we'll be seeing them twice more when we hit 1994. Hertz, meanwhile, had worked on a few Mega Drive ports for other companies (usually subcontracted through SIMS, the JP publishers here) and I guess put everything they had into this Sega CD original project, as they sadly did not survive the year.
Wiki Notes: Needed some text and a bit of sprucing up elsewhere. Also a header image.
Premise: Supercop Don Marshall takes to the streets to enforce the law, lethally.
Availability: Unlike many less popular arcade FMV light gun games, there's been nothing in the way of a Lethal Enforcers remaster. That's Konami for you.
Preservation: Hey, we're back here on the mean and apparently extremely sunny streets of Chicago where every criminal is indiscriminate with their shooting because they're all wearing shades and can't see shit. We covered Lethal Weapon back in Mega Archive #34 and with many of these MD-to-MCD ports there's a bunch of improvements, though in this case the improvements are more in the service of getting the game closer to arcade parity (though obviously the Sega CD FMV can only be so sharp). Like with the MD game, Lethal Enforcers was only ever sold with the Justifier light gun as a pack-in: you can't find it without the gun. Or at least, you can't get a regular-sized box of Lethal Enforcers as I'm sure many of the copies showing up on eBay et al "lost" the gun someplace. It always turns up where you least expect it, like in your luggage while lining up at TSA. One curious thing about this port: in Japan, the Mega CD release predates the Mega Drive one. I wonder if Konami worked on this first...?
Wiki Notes: Triple-dip, between the SNES and the Mega Drive. Just needed the Sega CD box art and releases.
Premise: Jonathan Harker's fiancée Mina caught the worst STD of all—vampirism—so Harker goes to kill the NTR (Nocturnal Transylvanian Resident) who might have had something to do with it.
Availability: Deceased for good this time, one hopes.
Preservation: Our second MD port this entry is Bram Stoker's Dracula, a licensed video game to tie-in with the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola movie and not to be confused with Ham Stroker's Dracula, which was a very different enterprise altogether. Like Lethal Enforcers, we covered this game's MD version back in Mega Archive #34. Unlike the Lethal Enforcers Sega CD port however, which just made visual and audio improvements courtesy of the wonders of the CD platform, the SCD Dracula plays very differently from the MD version owing to its different development team and could be considered an entirely separate game. In fact, our wiki already makes a distinction between the differing versions, which does make me wonder whether or not we should be separating them out into individual wiki pages, but that seems like more work than I'm willing to do right now for a movie tie-in from Sony Imagesoft. For clarity's sake, the Mega Drive version from Traveler's Tales played vaguely like Castlevania (fitting the theme) with large levels to platform your way around, while the Sega CD version feels more like a FMV brawler where you walk to the right a lot while punching bats. The protagonist of this game is Jonathan Harker, who in the movie was played by Keanu Reeves with an accent he must've found somewhere behind a tent at a Ren Faire, but this game's hero is definitely not Keanu Reeves. He looks (and animates) more like Keanu Reeves's pool shark uncle after he got drunk enough to "assume" he knew kung fu. The game's also really, really bad: it feels ancient, like Irem's Kung-Fu Master with constant annoying enemy spawns and the occasional trap you can poorly attempt to avoid with the very limited jumping distance. Could make for a good seasonal Blight Club game, at least. Bite Club. Man, I'm just doing all of Giant Bomb's work for it.
Premise: Sly Stallone and Michael Rooker play former professional partners who had a falling out after one disappointed the other, but are forced to work together in the face of a grave threat. Wait, that's Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.
Availability: Licensed game so nope.
Preservation: Unlike the other Mega Drive to Sega CD ports in this entry, this was a simultaneous release with the cart version and yet you'll still find some extra content in addition to the usual presentational enhancements which I guess means they made this one first and took out anything a cart couldn't handle later? Is that how game development works? Man, I worked in game development and I have no idea. Said enhancements are of course your standard grainy FMV clips from the movie (including about five minutes of the first act to set everything up) and CD music closer to the original score, and the extra content appears to be a 3D avalanche-evading snowboarding level I doubt anyone asked for, but you can't argue that it didn't make the Sega CD version that much more of an attractive proposition. Of course, I'm speaking in relative terms here: this is still a terrible movie tie-in that feels vaguely like the Spider-Man brawlers of the era in that they tried to break up all the punching with some "climbing while things are constantly flying at you" action stages. Movie's fun enough though. It's Die Hard on a mountain. (I think I said that last time? I covered it in Mega Archive #39, i.e. the most recent one as of writing.) I always did think it was a little messed up that it doesn't actually end on a cliffhanger.
Wiki Notes: Another triple-dip. I've spent more time than I'd like to believe writing about the Cliffhanger game.
Premise: Aliens have taken over a small town in the Lone Star State and replaced some of its population with their own shapeshifting agents. Are you a bad enough hombre to shoot first and check later if they were actually body snatchers or not?
Availability: Remastered in 2021 for PS4 and Steam.
Preservation: Oh hey, it's Ground Zero: Texas. One of the lesser celebrated of the big FMV shooting galleries on the platform, it must've been someone's favorite if it received a lavish Screaming Villains remaster. For those unaware, schlockmeisters Screaming Villains has rescued quite a few Sega CD FMV games from the dumpster of gaming history: they also worked on the 25th Anniversary Edition of Night Trap as well as remasters for Double Switch and Corpse Killer (both coming soon to Mega Archive CD). In Ground Zero: Texas, a group of shapeshifting aliens called the Reticulans (which I figured were so-named because you point reticles at them, but there actually is a Reticulum constellation out there; if that's an intentional pun then it's a good one) take over a southern rural town as a foothold for a planet-wide invasion, and it's up to some paranoid special forces operatives to flush them out. Mostly by switching between four camera feeds to shoot at random civilians who suddenly pull a raygun out of nowhere: it's that kind of fast-reflexes light gun game (albeit one that doesn't actually support light guns). Digital Pictures went all out on the budget for this one, even hiring enough Hollywood talent that they had to make good with the various unions involved in big movie productions, all just to see their hard-earned footage get reduced in visual quality to the point you can't make anything out half the time. Sometimes the tech just ain't there yet.
Wiki Notes: Pretty detailed page already. Just needed some releases and a header image. I yoinked one of the remastered screenshots from its Steam page: a slightly rotund dude in a Stetson shooting at people in front of a taco stand, all of which scream "Texas" to me.
Premise: True alien chads fix up their own rides rather than phone home for a pick-up like some kind of finger-glowing wuss.
Availability: Nope. I'm sure Puggsy's waiting to hear back from the ToeJam & Earl reboot devs.
Preservation: Our fourth Mega Drive port for this entry is, again, one that received enough new content to be worth adding here. I guess you can just assume that's the case for every SCD port going forward too, but in Puggsy's case it includes FMV intro cutscenes, CD music, and new levels and boss fights. Puggsy, if you don't recall from when we covered it on Mega Archive #33, is about an alien that resembles a space hopper as he makes his way across levels through a combination of standard platforming and some before-its-time physics engine tomfoolery with carryable objects that each have their own physical properties (some roll, some bounce, etc.). Traveler's Tales would later make a mint just releasing the same Lego platformer over and over, so it's reassuring to see here that they made something pretty ambitious early on in their careers.
Wiki Notes: Double-dip, just needed the Sega CD releases and box art.
Premise: Despite all my rage, I am still working on a wrestling game's wiki page.
Availability: Legally I don't think WWE can release anything with the WWF brand any more. Not without a bunch of panda goons stopping by and tossing furniture around as an intimidation tactic. When WWF's panda goons come calling, you're the one that's endangered.
Preservation: The Sega CD got exactly one wrasslin' game and you're looking at it. Well, to be exact, you're looking at me being unkind to it and to some extent the entire WWE institution in text form as I explain that this game is actually just WWF Royal Rumble with a few (but not as many as you'd hope) bells and whistles owing to the new platform. One of those is of course the addition of cage matches, in which wrestling talent is put behind bars instead of, in a more perfect world, the erstwhile owner of the business. We get some introduction voiceover clips, and previews of wrestler specials in glorious monochrome FMV, but someone forgot to commission any musicians so it reuses the original tinny Mega Drive sound chip renditions of all the entrance themes. It's like when you play those old PC ports of Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII and it's wall-to-wall MIDIs on the soundtrack; you guys realize you published these on CDs, right? Anyway, if the urge ever strikes to play as the Headshrinkers or the Nasty Boyz in a wrestling game that somehow doesn't offer a tag team mode (in 1993), by all means have at it.
Premise: Four warlords challenge the titular dark wizard after he conquers the nation of Cheshire. Dude must really love cheese or something.
Availability: Oddly, for a first-party RPG, it's never been rereleased. Didn't even make it on the Genesis Mini 2.
Preservation: Here we are with Dark Wizard, Sega's own sorta answer to Fire Emblem—though it's structurally closer to Master of Monsters between its unit management and hexagonal battlefields—which combines a strategy RPG where you summon units both generic and unique to overwhelm enemy commanders with a lavish anime production with a whole lot of talky cutscenes. It has four campaigns, each of which renders the others non-canonical due to how they address the death of the ruling monarch: the crown prince who seeks to avenge his father, a feisty knight captain who decides the prince is too much of a wuss to win the kingdom back on his own, a sorceress tricked into assassinating the king, and a vampire lord hoping to use the confusion to take over himself. Each have their own strengths and weaknesses, from their leadership potential to their economy income to their magical skills, as well as their own unit types and champions. It's apparently a real long game too: the promotional materials at the time suggested it would take 300 hours to see everything, which strikes me as unlikely. In Japan, the game is called Dark Wizard: Yomigaerishi Yami no Madoushi ("Resurrection of the Dark Wizard") but they dropped the mostly redundant subtitle for its North American release (and, like many RPGs, it passed over Europe entirely—ironic that the country that has the real Cheshire never got to see this fantasy version of it).
Wiki Notes: This was one of the most detailed Sega CD pages I've encountered so far, so very little work was needed. Minor edits only.
Preservation: Our final game for this Mega Archive CD entry is Arslan Senki, another strategy RPG. However, this one's based on the novels/manga/anime of the same name created by Yoshiki Tanaka. It's meant to be a companion piece to some OVAs that were produced after a couple of animated movies and uses the same character art, as far as I can tell. While Dark Wizard was sort of Fire Emblem but also sort of not, this game is the same except for the "sort of not" part. I'm sure diehard FE fans can point to many areas where the two diverge, but the moment I walked up to some nobody enemy goon and attacked him and was shown an animated cutaway that took off so many little vertical beans of health from his HP gauge I was immediately like "oh, huh, so it's one of those." I dunno, aping that series probably felt like a safe bet given this property has a whole mess of warfare in it while also following a bunch of important named characters around. I kinda wonder if Arslan Senki would've played like Suikoden instead had it come out five years later: a lot of similarities between the two franchises, especially as being an effeminate white-haired prince with a handful of loyal retainers trying to raise an army to take back his throne is almost exactly the plot of Suikoden V too. Incidentally, this is our one and only encounter with BEC on any version of the Mega Archive: they were a Bandai outfit (the acronym stands for Bandai Entertainment Company) that they formed with Human Entertainment which mostly assisted other Bandai-affiliated developers like SRW's robo-wranglers Banpresto but would infrequently put out games of their own. Anyway, Arslan (both the game and the anime) seem kinda neat so maybe I'll consider making it a Game OVA subject when summer rolls around.
Wiki Notes: Skeleton page, so needed a bit of everything.
Welcome all to another edition of Indie Game of the Week where we dare to go far, far outside of our gaming comfort zones in pursuit of the unknown and the untested. My daring choice this time is an explormer that has Souls tendencies; not something I tend to cover all the time on here, nope. This goof really kinda hinges on the assumption that I have regular readers and aren't just being randomly discovered by visitors who accidentally clicked on the wrong link on their Twitter feeds, huh. So, yeah, it's business as usual in my neck of the spooky, monster-filled woods as I check out Salt and Sacrifice, the follow-up to Ska Studio's similarly grim Souls-fest explormer Salt and Sanctuary. It really felt like this game just disappeared without a trace after its release; besides former staffer Jason Oestreicher giving it props (it made his 2022 GOTY list) I didn't really hear much about it. Shame, because it's shaping up to be something I'm definitely into, given it wisely saw how many more Soulsian explormers had popped up since Salt and Sanctuary—which at the time was a novelty, rather than the norm for modern Indie explormers—and chose to distance itself with a few meaningful changes to the formula. (And also way more color; Ska Studio is best known for their early monochrome enterprises so it must've shocked them to discover their various graphics programs had entire chromatic palettes to choose from.)
The world of Salt and Sacrifice has your morally flexible protagonist arrested for a crime of the player's choosing (this also determines your starting item, like a bunch of bombs for arsonists, though I am curious as to why they weren't taken from you) and opting for the alternative to prison and execution which is to become an "inquisitor": nominally holy warriors press-ganged into dealing with a scourge of villains that have adopted monstrous guises and equally monstrous magical powers, running rampant around several corners of the world. Sending violent criminals to fight monsters must be seen as a win-win for the justice system of this world, I'm sure. Your arrival to the embattled area has your warden killed in action, followed by yourself: however, since you drank some kind of mystical whatsit to bind you to your current mission, not even death can end your sentence prematurely. Not until the mages are all defeated, anyway. Gameplay-wise, it's an action-RPG like its inspirations, with a variety of different attacks (based on the weapon type), a block, a dodge roll, a ranged weapon that is accessed by a different attack button for convenience's sake, and a Rage system that allows you to cast spells and buffs depending on the gear you have. Said gear can be upgraded or replaced as you keep playing, the former option existing for those sets that have particular applications (like high resistance to specific elements) or just happen to be aesthetically "your thing".
This would be a relaxing and attractive place for studying the blade (while everyone else is partying) were it not for the corpses and this creepy wicker dude here in his Balatro skirt.
As in the previous game, levelling up essentially means buying nodes on a dizzyingly large skill tree: while intimidating at first, the only nodes of importance are those connected to your preferred melee and ranged weapon(s) and your armor type (light/heavy). Every other node just increases your stats: the usual assortment of utility stats like endurance (higher equipment weight limit), vitality (health), luck (more item drops), or will (more stamina) as well as the more focused combat stats like strength (heavy weapons), dexterity (light/ranged weapons), or arcana (magic). Most weapons tell you what they scale with, and if that's not enough of a hint then the nodes that allow you to equip stronger versions of that weapon type will naturally be connected by a bunch of nodes for the associated stat you'll need to use them effectively. It's a bit strange they still have this system for incremental stat increases instead of just the usual left-right sliders, but then those loquacious cads also added a little bit of lore to every single node to give the game that much more flavor text to consume for us fantasy prose-loving nerds.
Truth be told, I was fully expecting this to play out much like the original Salt and Sanctuary, but while the combat and the vibe are certainly similar—wouldn't be a Soulslike without dodge rolls, parries, and a bleakly saturnine atmosphere—the structure's quite a bit different. For one, the game now employs a discrete stage-based format not too dissimilar to the original Demon's Souls, where you can continue to make progress in one world after opening up the route to the next but you'll more than likely run into obstacles both figuratively insurmountable (higher-level enemies and bosses) or literally insurmountable (a traversal tool you don't have yet). I'm the stubborn sort that spent hours in the Hinterlands, the unnecessarily-huge opening area of Dragon Age: Inquisition, so I'm not comfortable leaving this first locale behind until I've explored (and noted down) the furthest contours I can presently reach and all the bosses I'd rather hold off on until I'm better equipped to deal with them. A sensible person might be better off heading to new areas as soon as they're available, as the difficulty curve and key item acquisition is no doubt configured for that approach. Still, though, the bosses I've met in the first region that live beyond the point where I could've bailed and left for the next world have been (mostly) reasonable, so it doesn't feel like I'm getting punished for procrastinating. Will always appreciate a game that can roll with my obstinacy.
What is this, Path of Exile? A fractal? The London subway? What happens when you give spiders cannabis? What my first attempt at any Bridge Constructor level invariably looks like? A visual metaphor for my psyche?
The game also takes to another classic explormer, Metroid 2, for inspiration in that in addition to the unique progress-blocking bosses you also need to follow your core directive to seek out wayward mages and devour their souls. A mage, if one's ever nearby, will continue to pester you with magic attacks and summons before vanishing after some amount of damage; however, if you find a certain totem you can "join the hunt" and this will allow you to track your quarry around by following a wispy UI compass marker that will eventually allow you to corner those pesky mages in their lairs and put an end to them. Each mage is focused on a particular element—lightning, fire, ice, water, and venom are the ones I've found so far—and every mage of a single type more or less fights with the same tactics, though the tougher ones tend to add more to their repertoires to keep you on your toes. More importantly, both the mage and its summons drop special elemental loot that can be transformed into equipment tied to that element, such as weapons that employ that element as damage, accessories and armor that can defend against that element or provide other benefits, and trophies to decorate your tent if you're the nasty type looking for bragging rights. Defeating one electromancer, therefore, might provide the gear you need to make the next electromancer that much easier to handle—or, in the case of weaponry, make mages of the opposing elements more vulnerable to your attacks. This first region alone had two "regular" bosses and at least seven mages, so they're a much more ubiquitous threat than they first seem. I've not played a whole lot of MonHun, but I recognize much of this system from that series; especially the parts where the boss keeps running away, because that's always fun.
For a Soulslike game, it's also pretty forthright and user-friendly about most of its mechanics, though perhaps less so with a few. For instance, it tells you what all the stats do, which is something Souls didn't for the longest time. Whenever you level up, you're given items you can then spend on the skill tree: this means there's no point hoarding salt (the level-up currency) if you're holding out for one high-value node or another since those skill tree items will sit comfortably in your inventory until you need them. The other currency, silver, is always halved every time you die (salt just needs to be recovered from your corpse, as is standard) but you can spend it on items that provide a slightly smaller amount of silver when used which works as a sort of makeshift bank system. I was slightly unhappy about all my silver disappearing before I realized what was what, but then so far I haven't found a whole lot of merchant NPCs with anything worth buying. Their XP items especially give you a terrible return on investment. There's no map, which is typical for Souls if less so for explormers in general, but the discrete stage-based format does alleviate this somewhat by making each area manageably compact. You might still want to take personal notes of various roadblocks all the same though: there's been pulley/ziplines I've been spotting everywhere that I now realize I should probably be keeping tabs on. Ammunition also replenishes at resting spots like the usual potions for healing and mana recovery, and all three can be upgraded further with rare items. Subsequently, there's no reason to not go nuts with ranged attacks if an opportunity to kill something from afar affords itself, though most enemies are surprisingly strong jumpers so be aware your distance advantage won't last long. There's also a limited form of fast travel within areas—some of the checkpoint obelisks have torches on them, and these are the ones you can warp to—and traversal in general feels fairly swift, though I've yet to acquire anything along the lines of an air-dash or double-jump yet which really gives these explormers the fluidity of movement that they thrive on (especially if you're going to be backtracking a lot).
I eat those mages like groceries.
On the whole, the significant changes made to Salt and Sacrifice does give its gameplay loop a different enough feel to the original to stand out, while still playing to that original's strengths of a semi-deep combat system of techniques, air-juggles, and careful maneuvering along with a typically bleak atmosphere. The hub area is enormous and slowly fills with NPCs as you rescue them, with multiple options for character and gear improvement should you ever feel overwhelmed with the current degree of enemy opposition, without necessarily diminishing too much the high challenge level for which this format of game is notorious. Progress has been painstaking without feeling too much like I'm getting batted around by foes way beyond my ability to handle—though the hydromancers and their tactic of endlessly summoning flying minions that project invincible shields over the boss and then spend the rest of the time hovering out of reach have definitely been testing my patience—and I'm getting the itch to keep on exploring and activating those little dopamine kicks whenever I open up a shortcut or find a new traversal tool that'll mean a bunch of free loot in the near future. It's all good stuff for this lizard brain of mine.
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Post-Playthrough Edit: Despite some iffy hitbox business towards the end of the game (I get that the tougher late-stage bosses would use bigger AoE attacks, but they really ought to terminate at the end of their visual effects) and the amusing chaos wrought by having many optional mages floating around trolling you, the normal enemies, and each other (which, while funny, gets in the way a lot especially in platforming sections) this ended on a pretty positive note for me. I'm still not won over by MonHun mechanics in general but it was novel to see them in an explormer, at least. Very much a worthy successor to Salt and Sanctuary, doing enough different with a sufficient amount of new ideas into which they could transplant their already solid combat and progression systems.
A fully 360-degree salu(ro)tation and a Happy Easter, Xbox to all who celebrate on this fine non-secular (but definitely not non-circular) annual event. Of course, there's nothing too festive about our regular exploration of the Xbox 360 library, one brief three-hundred-and-sixty-minute playthrough at a time, but you have to work the seasonal theme in there somewhere. Maybe I could've gone with an oval/circle motif instead? Well, I guess I'll put that idea off until we're back here again next year.
So yes, welcome to the fourteenth one of these now. If you're just joining us, the idea behind this feature is that I realized that I'd run out of space in both the area beneath the TV for the 360 console as well as room on the shelf for all the new Xbox One games I... haven't been buying (because I just get the occasional free month of Game Pass via Bing-Bux instead). Now that it's time to officially retire Microsoft's '00s-conquering magnum opus I've been trucking through all the backlog I've let build up for the thing. On top of that, we also have the many 360 games available on Game Pass too, provided it's one of the months when it's active (hence why none of the random choices have been Game Pass games so far, in case you were wondering or maybe forgot my original explanation all the way back in Episode 1).
There was a time when Microsoft was the market leader for video games, and that impressive legacy is what we celebrate today as the current future of Microsoft console gaming looks ever bleaker. Remembering the glory days with rose-tinted glasses: the imperative of anyone over 30 years old. Welcome to old.
Speaking of old, it's been a few weeks so you'll probably want (if not need) a refresher on the rules:
Every month I choose one Xbox 360 game I've been meaning to check in on before I finally leave that generation in the dust, and a random choice from the games I've been very pointedly ignoring up until now. I swear there's stuff in the random pool I want to play too, but I'll be darned if the random chooser app is going to let me anywhere near them.
Since we're all about coming full circle here, so to speak, each 360 game will be played for exactly 360 minutes. That's six hours straight, as I'm sure you all know by now.
With each game I'll discuss their history, how well they've held up, and the likelihood of Nintendo adding them to the Switch Online library. Gotta admit, that last one's a pretty remote chance.
Our final, ironclad rule is that we're prohibited from playing anything that's already in the Switch Online library or announced to be added. Fortunately, that's pretty much every 360 game off the hook.
For past episodes and the full rankings, make sure to check the links at the end. I can't make a table of links here right now. The table button is broken. *Cough*
History: Star Ocean: The Last Hope is the fourth game in tri-Ace's Star Ocean RPG franchise and the first to grace the Xbox 360 platform. The series famously juxtaposes science-fiction and fantasy, often by having characters from a Star Trek-like federation of planets get marooned on a primitive world stuck in a medieval-level technological era with the usual (for fantasy, not for our universe) mix of adventurers, magic, and monsters. The franchise's real-time combat frequently employs a "battle trophies" system that rewards players for difficult maneuvers, tactical play, or general milestones with each of the playable characters, thereby organically incentivizing those players to approach the combat system from multiple angles, and The Last Hope is no exception. The Last Hope debuted on 360, receiving an enhanced PS3 port the following year and a next-gen remaster for Steam and PS4 in 2017. You'll probably remember tri-Ace from when we covered Infinite Undiscovery back in Episode 5, but as a reminder: they were a group of developers that were part of the group that worked on Wolf Team's Tales of Phantasia and after that left to create their own studio to continue producing similar action-RPGs with a whole bunch of technical systems to learn. Their most famous output are the Star Ocean series and the Valkyrie Profile series, though they've been known to do the occasional one-off as well.
I bounced off Star Ocean: Till the End of Time so hard I think it had a knock-on effect for its sequels, to the extent that even though I've been sitting on this Limited Collector's Edition copy of The Last Hope (cute name for Star Ocean: Episode IV, you guys, real cute) for what feels like a decade I've yet to crack the seal on it. I'm happy for the opportunity to finally devalue it as a MIB collector's item though: as I outlined back in the very first episode of 360 in 360 half my plan for this feature was to finally settle some hashes with my 360 backlog before I moved on to greener plastics (that is to say, cases holding newer Xbox games). As for Star Ocean, I've always liked tri-Ace even if its output was firmly in the B-game equivalent tier for JRPGs—they were one of the few Japanese companies to do right by the Xbox 360 (along with Mistwalker) despite the system's dire performance in their homeland—but their big flagship series and I have never really seen eye-to-eye. I missed the first (as did we all until the localized remakes started showing up), bought a really scratched-up copy of the second that I barely made any progress in, had that aforementioned whale of a time with the third if said whale was a vengeful and obtuse Moby Dick, and... yeah, I know there are fifth and sixth ones out now but I'm not sure I have the stones to ever buy them. Maybe The Last Hope—which has a lower rating than Till the End of Time on Metacritic—will be the one to finally make this franchise tick for me. Stranger things have happened at sea (of stars (wait, that's the other one)).
90 Minutes In
Blindside, fool! Blaow!
This first ninety-minute block just breezed right on by as the game slowly introduced its setting, its characters, and its combat system. The first of those was presented as a historical movie of how Earth almost bit it after a disastrous World War III rendered most of the planet unlivable due to nuclear winter and radiation and how mankind's remnants pulled themselves together, invented a form of faster-than-light travel (which, we'd later find out, was the dumb way of doing it), and took to the stars to find a new home and a new future for our dumbass, self-destructive species. This involved creating the peaceful world government Greater United Nations (evidently the last one sucked if it allowed WW3 to happen) (I also appreciate that the world's foremost institution built for world peace has the acronym G.U.N.) and the Mankind's Evolving Geopolitically Universal Science and Technology Administration (or ME GUSTA! for short, exclamation mark optional) for all its humanity future-proofing needs. We play as a member of an expeditionary force sent to check out the distant planet of Aeos, identified as a possible habitable colony world. What could possibly go wrong?
So then we have the characters, who have been—without exception—annoying anime archetypes so far. No worries, I know what I signed up for. There's the protagonist Edge Maverick (...) who's sort of like Luke Skywalker mixed with Tidus and as equally whiny and cocky as both. There's the childhood friend and requisite love interest Reimi Saionji, who exists to scold the protagonist every chance she gets (tsun rise, tsun set). And... that's about it for playable characters as of present. There's also Crowe, our way cooler mentor type who vanishes during the prologue and will probably show up way later either dead or a villain or something, and a tiny squeaky anime woman called Welch who looks to be the one to talk to whenever I want to craft something. Crafting, by the way, is something the game is likely to drop on us very soon given all these recipes and components I keep finding. I've just recalled how involved the crafting was in SO3, so that's... something for which I guess I'll have to brace myself.
Just to briefly touch on the combat system, which the game took its time to tutorialize step-by-step almost as soon as I could move. As with other SO games it mostly plays like Tales—the devs did work on Tales of Phantasia after all, and I assume the two companies continued to pass each other notes once both franchises went 3D—in that there's some situational awareness involved as you pick out targets and try to avoid too much aggro (or letting your other team members such as, hypothetically, a tiny teenage girl with a bow gain more aggro than they can deal with). One novel feature is the parry-like "blindside": the idea is to hold down the dodge button, normally used by tapping both it and a direction to hop around, and then release it just as the enemy attacks—by doing that you can whizz around behind them and get in a few guaranteed crits on their behind. Some tougher enemies have a "blindside-counter" though, so unless the timing's perfect you'll just get punished for blindsides instead. Another issue is that you can only blindside your currently targeted enemy and others can still attack you while you're sitting there defenseless poised for a blindside opportunity to happen, so it works best when enemies are dispersed elsewhere or you only have the boss to worry about. No doubt in my mind that the combat will gain in complexity as the game progresses.
Oh right, I forgot to mention the current plot: Our ship the Calnus and the other ships that were sent out to explore Aeos all got caught in some sort of subspace mishap and crashlanded on the planet instead, and the one furthest from us suddenly just had their comms go offline. They're probably fine. We (that is, Edge and Reimi) have just set off to investigate. So far, the game is... fine. Entirely agreeable. I think this is the breather mission before they start introducing waves of overwhelming RPG feature nonsense that I'll have to weather as best as I am able. For now, I guess I'll just keep mashing these giant space bugs. Don't these guys know I'm from Buenos Aires and I say kill them all?
180 Minutes In
How'd a bunch of 14-year-olds become astronauts, anyway?
This 90 minute segment was pure combat and exploration, having put aside most of the story stuff for the time being, and it ended just before what I believe is our first boss fight—I found something that looked like a save point (yep, those are still here) except it didn't let me save but instead recovered all my HP and MP (yep, save points don't do that). It's been smooth enough sailing now that I've embraced the blindside and can quickly dispatch most enemies in a single combo, and I've learned quite a few other things about the combat... or more accurately, I remembered the combat tutorial at the beginning the game and what it was trying to teach me as I impatiently hurried through its lessons.
More integral than I first realized was the bonus board. The bonus board is a honeycomb-like gauge on the right side of the screen that fills with gems as you perform certain feats, each sticking around in subsequent battles until either the player rests at an inn or the board gets broken (which happens whenever the playable character takes a critical hit, so for the board's sake if not just your own it's best to stay defensive). Blue gems are created whenever you finish an enemy off with a critical hit—all blindside attacks are automatic criticals, so these gems are the easiest to earn—and award 10% bonus XP per gem. Pink gems are formed if you defeat an enemy with skills alone (a tiny amount of HP/MP recovery), yellow ones for defeating two enemies in one attack (bonus money), and green ones for surviving ambushes. Ambushes, rather than having the enemy get the drop on you (which are instead "surprise attacks"), are when you're close to multiple enemy groups and have to fight them one after the other: on top of the green gems, which adds to the Party SP pool, you also get a hefty XP bonus. SP, incidentally, is what you spend to level up your characters' skills—both combat and non-combat, the latter including things like harvesting resource points or crafting—so having a big pool of it that anyone can use is very handy for getting certain useful skills promoted quickly. Anyway, I've been rocking a 120-140% XP boost for most of this segment, and the subsequent level boost has made survival quite a bit easier after a few rocky bumps at the start there.
A few other observations:
My HP recovery options are extremely limited. Besides this boss fountain thing and the bunk on the ship we crashlanded on, there's no way to fully heal the party. I've been using the finite healing items I occasionally gather from resource points and monster drops, neither of which show up often. After I got my protag killed early on (archer girl was still alive, fortunately) I had the choice of legging it back to the ship or using a very precious revivial item. The eternal battle rages on between my indolence and my parsimony (and the winner gets to take on my vainglorious propensity for loquacious vocabulary choices).
The horizontal camera movement is flipped. At least... it feels like it is. I wonder if I'm going a little crazy sometimes.
Whenever you complete a battle, there's sometimes an info screen if you acquired new battle trophies (more on those in a sec) or encountered a new monster and had its data added to the bestiary. In fights when neither of these alerts happen, which is most of them, the game hangs on an empty screen until you press the confirm button. It's kinda sloppy?
You get a real small amount of XP and SP whenever you open a chest or harvest a resource point. S'cute. Maybe it'll be a better earner later in the game.
Unlike Star Ocean 3, you don't have to hug the contours of the current area to earn 100% map completion and a free item. Maps are just automatically filled instead. Did map technology regress between SO4 and SO3 (the former being set several hundred years before the latter)? Either way, my OCD gets to take a break.
Battle trophies are like an in-game achievement system that was also around in earlier SO games. Like I said above they tend to be for combat milestones and weird little accomplishments, like doing 55 damage exactly with one attack. There's an actual Xbox achievement for every 10% of them you earn including one for 100%. Just to clarify things here, there's 100 battle trophies per character and 900 overall. Gotta get to grindin' if I want that 1000 Gamerscore, I guess...
270 Minutes In
Hey guys, what you're looking at? The Steam reviews for the Last Hope remaster? Wouldn't recommend it.
Mostly an exposition drop this past hour and change. Shortly before taking on the boss on a beach area close to where the other spaceship had crashed we were introduced to our third party member: an elfin fencer named Faize, who arrived on a very fancy floating spaceship shuttle. Faize, it turns out, is part of the Eldarian race (oh shit, the Eldar! Hide your Slaanesh totems!): an extraterrestrial species that had previously made contact with Earth after our initial warp drive testing some ten years before the game began, very similar to the circumstances behind humanity's first contact with the Vulcans in Star Trek (funny, that). The three of us then pummeled the goofy sea slug creature that had emerged from the wreckage of the ship we were looking into. This was an interesting fight because the boss's weakpoint appeared on its side. That meant frontal attacks were out but so were my blindsides, which attack from the rear. Instead, the idea was to draw aggro with one character and then use another to flank and focus attacks on that weak point while the boss was distracted, switching again when the aggro target changed.
After a quick powerwalk back to the crash site of our own ship (sadly, no fast travel yet) we discovered the Eldarians had built a huge-ass base right next to it. Despite being some "just add water" pre-fab thing the place had a whole bunch of facilities we never had access to previously, of particular note being a shopping area where I could finally buy some damn curatives (and they were super cheap, so I stocked up), a new bow for archer girl, and some skillbooks for the team. The three party members received passive skills that allowed for more monster drops—each character getting one for a specific enemy type—as well as a first aid skillbook that occasionally healed that character after they received damage. Should keep the front-liners healthy, and some enemies do so little damage now that I could probably sit there and let the skill proc enough times to heal me back up to full since the heals works on a % of my total. Of course, I could still get critted during that process, which means losing my delicious bonus board. Hm.
Anyway, a story-mandated rest and a few fetch side-quests later, I'm about ready to embark on the next stage of the story. What I'd really like is to recruit a character that can mine the relevant resource points: I keep walking past those glowy walls, wondering what kind of amazing ores I'm missing out on. The hooks are definitely in, I'm sad to report.
360 Minutes In
When I look into the cold, dead eyes of this thing I'm reminded that tri-Ace RPGs always have to have at least one character like this.
Turns out the next thing we have to do on this bug planet is... leave it. In the newly repaired Calnus, no less, which the Eldarians packed with advanced technology on our behalf (curious as to what their angle might be; no such thing as a free lunch). The captain of the Calnus is staying behind to run the exploration base on Aeos, essentially our sole beacon of civilization out here, choosing to drop his old job in the lap of the first underqualified schmuck to enter his field of vision. After Edge becomes the new captain, and the crew is streamlined to just Reimi and Faize (I'm sure that's plenty to run an interstellar starship), we're tasked with heading to the next planet capable of supporting life. One called Lemuris, which has an atmosphere near identical to Earth's before we ruined it. Only issue with claiming this place for mankind (or Eldarkind) is that it's already got a whole bunch of people living on it. Hey, didn't stop American settlers I guess.
And so begins the next arc of the game on the planet Lemuris. Aeos had a humid, hot climate—the game refers to it being similar to the Jurassic period on Earth, though with more bugs than dinosaurs—but Lemuris looks to be fairly cool and temperate. Apropos, given the first town we walk into, Triom, resembles a medieval European village. Naturally, we're hailed as gods as soon as we arrive (someone spotted our spaceship, which we parked about 200 yards outside of town because we're professionals) and we meet the elder (not Eldar) of the village, only to be interrupted by our fourth party member: a monotone gremlin of a pre-schooler calling itself Lymle. She's naturally a genius mage, hilariously outshining our resident magic-user Faize immediately, and the party of four set off to find a cure for this "bacculus" petrification illness that's been slowly killing off the villagers. Like the greyscale of Game of Thrones, only more comically rocky. Beyond that, I had time to do the usual when exploring a primitive world—check the shops for all the superior weaponry and armor they're carrying—and bought the "Parapsychology" and "Elusion" skills ("more shit dropped from undead monsters" and "easier escaping", respectively) for our new party member before my time with this game was finally up.
Our journeys across the star ocean now come to a (possibly temporary, depending on how I feel later) end. I've much to say about my feelings on the game but I'll save it for the usual post-playthrough summation. Honestly, though, for what feels like six hours of not a whole lot happening that time really did just whizz by. The ominous time-consuming power of long-form RPGs at work.
How Well Has It Aged?: Not As Well As The Other "[Something] Hope", But Well Enough. I dunno, I actually quite liked what I've played of this so far. The combat system's enjoyable enough with that blindside mechanic and the enormous boons granted by the bonus board (provided I don't let it shatter every other fight) and even if the characters can be kinda oofa-doofa in that special tri-Ace way the story and universebuilding have that classic sci-fi drive of exploring strange new worlds and seeking out new life and all that jazz. Anime Mass Effect, perhaps, albeit with a fraction of the emotional intelligence given we're still dealing with children in the lead as per usual. I know this whole invention/crafting system is going to kick my ass once I finally give it some attention and there's probably some degree of the same tiresome BS that eventually had me bail on Till the End of Time, which almost the entire internet seems to agree is the better game, but maybe I'll slum it with "We Have Phantasy Star at Home" for a while longer yet. (The mere half-hour I've spent with Lymle is really making me reconsider that, though...)
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Uhh, zero. Why do I keep including this section?
Achievements Earned: 1 out of 50. That was for that first boss. Look, this game has a lot of game still left in it, you know? There's about ten more story achievements, nine for the endings (there's one per character seems like), and the rest are for sheer grinding by the look of things. Oh, and it expects you to beat the game three times total: Galaxy (normal) to unlock Universal (hard), Universal to unlock Chaos (very hard), and then beat it on Chaos. And, lest we forget, there's the 900 battle trophies too. Hats off to anyone insane enough to get the full 1000 for this one.
History: Grabbed by the Ghoulies is an action-brawler game and the first that British developers Rare developed exclusively for Microsoft after they were acquired by same. Originally, Rare had intended the game to be released on GameCube but modified their plans after the buyout. It concerns the teen scaredycat Cooper who enters a mysterious spooky mansion with his cynical girlfriend Amber after they get caught in a storm. The owner of the place, Baron Von Ghoul, is insulted by their banter and decides to kidnap Amber for funsies and Cooper must fight his way through the place's monster infestation to rescue her before they can escape together.
Now, you might recall back in Episode 11 of 360 in 360—now forever ingloriously known as "The Fuzion Frenzy Fiazco"—that we created a concession for original Xbox games if, and only if, they were backwards compatible with the Xbox 360 (and ideally the Xbox One as well, since that's what I'm playing on). That means ol' Tugged on the Testicles here, or whatever it's called, became eligible for the random choice process if that capricious app ever felt like hopping back a generation. Like many N64 diehards (ooh, I should do some kind of feature with that console next), I was a huge Rare fan and was excited to discover how many more 3D platforming nonpareils would emerge on Microsoft systems after the latter purchased the former outright. What optimistic, deluded fools we were. Even so, I'm for sure morbidly curious enough to see how this game turned out after avoiding it for so long. Maybe there's something to it, and maybe that something has managed to hold up after 20 years? I guess I never did shake that naivety.
90 Minutes In
Rare embracing their new owners.
Oh boy, six hours of this, huh? Not for the first time does this feature seem a little overbearing with its time requirements (Episode 2 being a particularly dire example that had me rethink the "random choice" pool). Well, I honestly can't say GbtG has been too bad so far, just a bit repetitive. The idea of the gameplay loop is to travel room to room in pursuit of a specific goal, usually completing some type of combat challenge in each. These challenges might involve eliminating all enemies, just the enemies of a certain type, finding a key in one of the breakable environmental objects, finding a key on one of the equally breakable enemies, or something more distinct and perhaps based around the room's theme. Right after entering the scary mansion, I was given the lockpicks by Barry a fight tutorial by the butler, Crivens, but the game's entire combat engine can be mostly summed up with "use the second analog stick to attack in that direction" and "pick up objects to do more damage". You know, standard brawler game stuff. Most normal punches and kicks do minor damage but a combo or an item might knock an enemy down, leaving them open for elbow drops and other more damaging attacks once they're prone. Our cowardly protagonist Cooper is a big fan of hitting people when they're down it seems, or maybe he just makes an exception for weird gross monsters.
Progress-wise, I'm a good chunk of the way through Chapter 2. Chapter 1 had me track down Amber, who was moving from area to area despite being tied to a chair, and upon finally reaching her in the basement she was transformed into an ugly green creature (reusing some story beats from the end of the first Banjo-Kazooie) and our new mission for Chapter 2 was to assist the cook, one of the few friendly NPCs here, to create a potion to change her back. On top of that, I've also been noticing other tied-up teenagers around the place: I can't do anything with them yet, since I need a special key, but I'm guessing I'll be going through all these rooms again in a later chapter. To be clear, there's no non-linear aspect like there is in Luigi's Mansion (though even that was limited) but rather you're tasked with taking a very specific pre-determined route to reach every major story-critical location. My one collectathon oasis is a series of books found in each room—including rooms you've previously visited—that unlock special challenges in a different part of the main menu. They tend to be out in the open more often than not, but sometimes you have to break open some furniture or kill a certain ghouly before you can find them. (I checked; you can always use a level select system to go back to where you may have missed one, so that's some pressure off if I mess up and leave too quickly. I'm keeping my eyes peeled regardless; I want to pretend I'm playing a classic Rare game, after all.)
I'm... not entirely sure how much content this game has. If I do end up completing it before dinging the final timer here, I suppose those bonus challenges could keep me busy instead.
180 Minutes In
The groundskeeper, who mostly exists to make sus jokes about fondling his own balls. Every Rare game's gotta have one.
Still in Chapter 2, though it feels like we're pretty much done with this arc since I've already recovered all the ingredients and used the potion on Amber—it didn't work, as you can see above—so after I escape here I'll probably get another potion-crafting fetch quest that'll take me all over the mansion grounds again. Still, though, the game's been tossing new challenges at me everywhere we go: I recently encountered the first instances where I wasn't allowed to get hit, where I wasn't allowed to destroy any part of the level (the monsters could still do it for me, though), and one where I wasn't allowed to defeat the same type of enemy twice in a row. For as simple as the gameplay is, at least Rare found a bunch of different ways to frame objectives around it.
Some other features I didn't mention last time:
There's a map of the mansion! It's not super helpful without any notations (or indeed necessary since the whole game is linear, as stated) but I'm still glad enough to have it. Gives me some vague idea what's coming up, you know? All I have to do to summon it is to hit the... white button? Oh right, I forgot that was a whole thing. Fortunately, better Xbox controllers are available and that black/white nonsense has been shunted over to the collar buttons. (Now, collar buttons I can wrap my head around.)
Almost every time you enter a new room, the antagonist readjusts your health. This can often be bad, like if it's reduced to single figures, but on the whole the system is handy because it won't let you limp through areas if you've just taken a beating and the value it adjusts to is always something theoretically survivable with the current challenge. No randomly dropping me to 5HP when there's a big combat challenge coming up; more likely that'll be one where I'm meant to sneak around and avoid enemies.
There's a "Super Scary Spook" jumpscare system where you have to quickly input a QTE before it drains your health. Some are inescapable, like traps put around exits, but others might involve bumping into a ghost: you have a brief window to escape the AoE of the spook effect to avoid dealing with the QTE. Can't be a horror game without jumpscares, right?
Some areas begin with a first-person mode perspective. It's usually just to set up a new room as Cooper looks around nervously, but you'll sometimes go through a whole room in this mode just because the game felt like being cute with its atmosphere.
In addition to the usual furniture items you can swing around, you'll have stretches of the game where an NPC gives you a weapon to use. These weapons tend to have infinite durability and a ranged mode that has a bit of a cooldown aspect to stop you spamming it. The weapons are then taken away a few rooms later, but they definitely make the game easier while you have them.
Soup cans! Just like in The 7th Guest, these things are ubiquitous and tend to confer temporary benefits (or maluses) for the current room. Some soups also restore a set amount of health or can instantly complete the current challenge for you. The negative ones do the usual troll stuff like reverse your controls or slow you down. The worst ones are those that sap your health to 1HP; I've often had to retake a room because of them.
Death (in the sense that you get KO'd, not the grim reaper) is only a minor setback, as it just resets the current room. It's occasionally unavoidable. Or maybe it just feels that way.
Death (the grim reaper, not in the sense that you get KO'd) will appear whenever you fail a challenge and slowly loom towards you with its finger of instant-death pointed at you. Sometimes that's a cue to get the heck out of there. However, Death's hands are rated E for Everyone so it's also a useful means of quickly finishing off tougher enemies too. Sort of like using the Spelunky "hurry up" ghost to your own advantage.
Anyway, we're fifty "scenes" into the game now—at least, according to how many books I've found—so I strongly suspect we're going to hit the full 100 before it's over: I still have to save Amber (again) and then all those other kids I've seen tied up. If that's the case, I'm on the right pace to complete the game just as I run out of time here; I suspect I'll just miss it though, especially if these challenges continue to get longer/harder.
270 Minutes In
Check out those cool reflections! Couldn't do that on a N64. Nor would you necessarily drop three skeletons with ranged weapons up against a dude with only 6HP, but then this game is nothing if not innovative.
I wasn't quite correct with my guess: rather than escape my mutated girlfriend I just had to beat her up a little (typical Saturday night for us) and the cook came through with the actual cure, having messed up the first time. We were thankfully spared another unnecessary fetch quest that had us jogging to the far corners of the mansion. Instead, with Amber now back to her normal feisty '90s heroine self, I had to go see Crivens to find out how to save everyone else trapped in here. After rescuing him from a room of winged imps—the extra challenge here was to only use weapons to defeat the enemies, which can be tough when they're all breakable and will eventually run out—he let us know we had to solve some sort of musical riddle to reach the boss, the clues for which were... scattered around the far corners of the mansion.
As also predicted, the game is getting magnitudes more unpleasant as it continues to rise in difficulty. I'm at 69 books now (nice), well behind the projected 75 for a game completion pace, so unlike in 360 in 360 Episodes 4 and 7 it seems unlikely I'll be running into that thorny issue of completing the game well before the timer finishes. Probably for the best; we all remember how awkward it was to fill that time staring at those game over screens while talking about the weather. The last room had me spawn at 15HP—barely anything—and then filled the room with skeletons and royal mummies (they can curse; it works like Doom in Final Fantasy in that it gives me a separate timer that kills me if I don't get rid of it, either by defeating the mummy or escaping) and had me survive all that for 90 seconds. Finding the book, as is often the case now, was the hardest part: I had to bust open a vault that also dropped a ton of malus potions that I could barely avoid walking over. Nothing like getting a death curse timer shorter than the timer that lets me leave, all the while my hit points dwindle to single figures as I'm stun-locked by skellies because I dropped my guard after my controls got reversed. The sort of uniquely delightful experience only this game can (or has chosen to) deliver.
Anyhoo, I have one piece of this mystical riddle doodad and am now getting close to the second. Still seeing locked up brats everywhere I go, so I imagine it'll be quite the journey passing back through all these places with the right keys.
360 Minutes In
Boy, there sure are a lot of armed enemies in there and boy the game sure didn't start me with much health again. This whole end-game is just wonderful stuff.
Alas, or hooray, but I didn't quite make it to the end of Grabbed By the Ghoulies. I'm at 84 books so if my theory is correct the end is almost in sight, but man is the game pulling out all the stops. Difficulty hikes include: getting more of the big hitters on a regular basis, including enemies like the mummies or vampires that are immune to almost everything; the QTEs now require ten-button strings in as many seconds; most of the new rooms are somehow the size of an entire floor so it takes longer to repeat them if I should die; there's frequently a second surprise challenge once you get close to the exit door in case you thought you were home and dry; and if the good Baron deigns to let me have more than 10HP for any room, where most enemies do that much per attack, it's a banner year. Much of this difficulty seems artificially pumped up but in fairness the game has been diligent in teaching me its tricks and shortcuts.
Some examples of what I mean: A particular scene had QTEs every five yards and an enemy with 80HP which could drop QTE scares on you at will or else turn invincible for a few seconds as it charged at you, and you start with 5HP for this area. Not great. However, with enough searching around you'd find a soup to counter every issue: one that automatically does the QTEs for you, one that gives you plus 10HP (not much, but at least you're out of one-hit kill territory), and one that lets you one-shot enemies instead which means a much easier fight against that burly ghouly. Another scene had me search for a key in the environment—it's in one of several scientific experiment tanks, the rest of which drop exploding worms on you—and another key on an enemy, except the enemy in this case is an invincible vampire. The third part of the challenge contained the solution: don't kill any skeletons, which spawn from some of the cages littered around this lab area. To defeat the vampire you have to purposefully lose the challenge by killing a skelly, summon Death, and then position the vampire between Death and yourself so it'll kill the vampire instead. You also have to do all this while avoiding four of those rampaging 80HP enemies I mentioned.
In many cases at this stage of the game, it's a matter of exploring all the options you have available by avoiding enemies for the time being and breaking open the environment to see what soups you can employ: you'll probably die a few times with those enemies ass-slapping you when your back is turned but the added recon can really transform what seemed to be an insurmountable challenge into just a deeply annoying one.
Regardless, our time in Baron von Ghoul's House of Horrors draws to an end and so too does our Halloween vacation in March (or is it April now...?). Time to stop tossing furniture around the room for a moment—I'll leave it to all y'all's imagination whether if I'm referring to in-game or an IRL heated gamer moment—and look at how this game has held up as objectively as I am able.
How Well Has It Aged?: About As Well As Those Zombies. I keep wanting to bring up Luigi's Mansion, in part because there's obvious structural and stylistic comparisons to be made, but more in how the two games both kinda represented what was possible for their respective (and competing) consoles by creating a short, spooky action-adventure game close to the system's launch that could ably serve as a tech demo. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that one game was made in response to the other. Of the two, GbtG has held up the least well because there's just not a whole lot to it. It does its best to keep throwing new ideas at you, but the combat and exploration are both hopelessly simple if not always particularly easy to deal with. It doesn't look too bad at least, and has a typically fun Grant Kirkhope soundtrack sharpened by so many spooky Banjo-Kazooie and DK64 haunted mansion levels, but it feels rudimentary and limited in a way its N64 predecessors did not (or if they were, it was more excusable given their era). Still, though, it was kind of amusing to see so many barfy ghost pirates and skeletons when you consider what Rare's doing these days.
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Still zero. Though maybe some other Rare games could get on there? Maybe? Rare? Nintendo? Microsoft? ...Bueller?
Achievements Earned: N/A. If only I was playing the Rare Replay version...
And that's going to be a wrap for this edition of 360 in 360. As I always say, I'll continue to have the patience to make these so long as you all have the patience to read them. A spreadsheet of previous episodes and the overall ranking list so far can be found via this totally normal link.
All that's left is to remind everyone to tune in next week for a new episode of 2600 in 2600, where I'll be playing Atari's Combat for over 43 hours straight.
Welcome back to another Indie Game of the Week where this time we're taking a break in the ol' Casual Corner with the wholesome organizational puzzle game A Little to the Left. Now, if you were to ask me which game best served as a paean to one's OCD tendencies I'd probably point to Donkey Kong 64 and its vast pile of banana-flavored junk to collect—and I'm not comfortable with how many times a month I invoke that game in particular these days; it's getting worrisome—but it looks like there's a new contender for that throne. A Little to the Left is all about being faced with a group of objects and sorting them in the way that makes the most intuitive sense to the player. This might involve placing cutlery in a tray with slots perfectly sized for each knife, fork, spoon, and other tabletop accoutrement, or it might mean sorting a group of pencils by their height, color, or sharpness. Most puzzles have a single solution you need to glean, but others might have two or three: your own organizational senses could intuit one result right off the bat, but you'll need to adjust your thinking a little to glean the others.
The game presents these puzzles one after the other sequentially, with each group of about twenty or so having some sort of connecting domestic theme: kitchen items, living room objects, garden plants, etc. Generally, you can't move onto the next puzzle unless you figure out at least one of the solutions for the present, though there's always the option to skip (this option given the self-aware name of "let it be", suggesting the game knows as much as anyone how slightly insane this desire to keep things tidy and orderly might seem to those without that urge). The level of intuition the game operates on is usually spookily accurate—even if I didn't figure out the current solution immediately, it would make sense once I did—but you do get the occasional moon logic approach, or those where the alternative was basically the same as the first but with a slight tweak. If it can be a little frustrating to encounter these it's probably only because you've no doubt been gliding through a group of intuitively-clear puzzles only to suddenly and abrasively hit a logic roadblock. That the overall ratio, at least for me, was overwhelmingly towards the "oh yeah, of course" side is either a plus in the game's book in being able to presage so accurately its players' idiosyncratic thought patterns, or a minus in mine for being so easy to read.
This bookshelf is the first to have multiple solutions. One might be obvious, the other less so. (That they didn't make the names legible, thereby creating a third sorting method, was a smart way of ensuring a minimal amount of localization work.)
While there is some inherent appeal of having a large collection of knick-knacks to sort out, as a game A Little to the Left is full of grating annoyances mostly of the QoL and UI variety. I think this is often the case with new developers that just need some more experience under their belt; I don't know how much game design background the two leads of this project had, who appeared in one of these State of Play/Nintendo Direct things as an affable Canadian couple who were maybe a little too obsessed with their cat (more on that in a moment), but navigating the game and its puzzles was often an irritation. For one, puzzles aren't numbered or named which makes tracking them for online hints aggravating. The achievements are completely busted too: there's one for playing its "Daily Tidy" mode a hundred times, and another for playing thirty consecutively, even though these Daily Tidy levels are taken directly from the game's progression and would therefore be puzzles you've already solved. Why would anyone keep coming back for three months to tackle the same puzzles they've already seen? There's also separate achievements for using the hint system (which only ever gives you the most obvious solution, making it near useless for fully completing those puzzles with multiple) and the skip level system several times each but also on top of that some "no hint"/"no skip" achievements that are instantly voided if you use either, and they put these lower down the achievement list than the "use hints"/"use skips" ones. Just sloppy, pointlessly antagonistic stuff from a game that's otherwise so chill and amiable.
I also thought the end was an incomprehensibly weird sequence that essentially deified the game's irksome feline villain as some sort of God of Chaos that kinda popped out of nowhere, and was so unrelated to anything else that I feel fine with spoiling it here. I couldn't tell if the game was ultimately telling us to fall in love with the cat or not, since it was invariably a progress-erasing nuisance in every instance it appeared, but for as fluffy as that little guy was I can't say I had too many positive feelings towards them by the end of the game. Then again, I suppose how else do you end a game like this but with a whimsical out-of-left-field cutscene? Even so, it felt like I understood even less than I thought about what the game was trying to tell me about my own obsessive tendencies and maybe letting go of same. Instead I was stacking Tupperware boxes to help a cat reach the moon so it could be reborn as some kind of immortal nocturnal terror ready to throw the entire world into disarray. Great? I guess that's the result I always wanted as the type of neat freak this game is ostensibly aimed at? ...I'm just overthinking all this, aren't I? Yeah, I'm seeing it now.
Now this? This pleases me. Putting aside for a moment why a toolbox would be built to accommodate bent nails (or acorns and teeth, for that matter).
I don't want to come off as too negative about a game this cute and low-key rewarding because casual games rarely deserve the derision they tend to receive for not being "real games", especially if they're somewhat novel like this. A Little to the Left is frequently a delight and scratches an organizational itch very few other Indies ever acknowledge: the only example I can recall right now is Wilmot's Warehouse with regards to those rare few games that massage the particular part of the brain that needs to have anything "just so" in a manner that might only make sense to the beholder and be utterly mystifying to anyone else. The whole "well, this desk is not untidy if I know where everything is" paradigm. For attending to that slightly disquieting part of my jumbled mind, and giving me the comfort of knowing a game like this couldn't exist and sell if it wasn't a more universal impulse, I do appreciate what the game is doing here. I just wish the QoL stuff in the periphery was a little more polished, but then I suppose that's what sequels are for.
Game of the Month: Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin
What up my Chaos-hating comrades to another Mento's Month and another game that really represents what I'm all about these days: combining legacy JRPG franchises that I've been playing for literal decades and anything that even remotely resembles a Souls game. Just needs some explormer action in there somewhere and we'll have hit the Mento trifecta. Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin is a collaboration between Square Enix and Koei Tecmo's Team Ninja, the latter exercising their particular model of Soulslike that involves a discrete stage-based structure and a whole bunch of colored loot which they debuted with Nioh and perfected with Nioh 2. Playing more Final Fantasy has also become an objective of mine ever since penning this 35 in 35: A Not-So-Final Final Fantasy Retrospective list for the franchise's 35th birthday. Final Fantasy will hit its 37th anniversary at the end of this year so I've been planning various means to maintain this "one played game per year of its existence" quest. The Nioh crossover was the most obvious way I could go about maintaining the ratio for another year, and I've solid enough plans for the next few years too. Thankfully, it's not like the franchise is going away any time soon if the sales numbers of the Final Fantasy VII remakes are accurate, though I'll admit to not being particularly enthralled by the prospect of playing through that game a second time (not that I dislike FFVII by any stretch; its just a very lengthy and memorable enough story that it's going to feel too much like a retread even with all this divisive new alternative story content).
Stranger of Paradise sees the very first Final Fantasy receive a prequel of sorts, but it's not so much a narrative continuation (or pre-continuation, or whatever the prequel term for that might be) but a deconstruction of that game and its surprisingly ambitious story as well as of the franchise as a whole. As the taciturn Jack, an apparent Warrior of Light holding a fated crystal, the goal is to follow the plot of the first game as you hit one temple dedicated to an elemental crystal after another, defeating the fiends that are corrupting their power for their own ends. However, the game is constantly hinting that something is awry with this particular tale, between Jack's flashbacks to an unfamiliar land and the sheer number of extradimensional Final Fantasy (which is to say, not FF1 but FF2-15) allusions. Mostly it's an excuse for a bunch of silly edgelord posturing which just about props up a Kingdom Hearts-level metaverse mindscrew of a story about an advanced society messing around with the world of Final Fantasy I like it was their own experimental petri dish combined with an endless source of natural resources to plunder. Like a Final Frackersy, if you will.
The whole game's like this.Comparing pants, as you do. The most important thing is the Job Affinity: for every 100 XP I earn, I'll get 19 XP for the Ninja job with the left pair or 27 XP for Dragoon with the right pair. Given you can easily go over 100% with the affinity boost and jobs max out at 30 (before the post-game insanity) they tend to hit the limit quickly.
Nioh always had a penchant for loot and featured overly complex character building and combat systems that took half the (very long) game to figure out, and that's what Stranger of Paradise is all about too. Manna for number perverts. Yet there's also an expediency to Stranger of Paradise where you never feel like you're getting an opportunity to feel things out with a new class since by the time the mission's done (provided you have a sufficiently high attunement rating) it's likely you'll have maxed it out or progressed far enough to unlock the nodes needed for the superior advanced and expert jobs: little point hanging around the basic jobs unless you have more of those job nodes to activate.
Stranger of Paradise is to Final Fantasy what Rising: Revengeance was to Metal Gear. In some ways it feels almost like a parody; an overly edgelord mirror put up against the franchise's infamous foibles with regards to its inscrutability that only nominally resembles the original source. However, that funhouse mirror distortion also feels like it has a lot of truth and affection behind it, and as you get further into it the game becomes less like an unkind pastiche and more like an adaptation of some familiar material in the style of an entirely new creator. Metal Gear also had another case of this: The Twin Snakes, which amped up the degree of competence of Humanity's Greatest Soldier to almost ludicrous levels in the hands of a very different kind of auteur. Stranger of Paradise might be narratively bonkers and emotionally discordant but which Final Fantasy isn't, at least some of the time?
I kinda love what they did to the Floating Continent of FFVI, because now this place is a horrifying mess of flesh, bones, and lava. The clashing tones does make it hard to navigate the terrain or find collectibles though.All right, all right, settle down weirdos. She's just talking about his penis. (Also don't ask me what the bloom operator is up to here.)
Don't get me wrong, by most metrics Stranger of Paradise is not a great game, let alone a great Soulslike RPG. The loading times on PS4 are abysmal, ironic given that the rough textures makes it look like a PS3 game half the time, and between the sheer density of the features it throws at you from the jump and the obtuse density of its meta narrative it takes a real long while until you're able to match its wavelength and I wouldn't fault a single person who bailed on the game long before they could reach that point. The loot spam is almost out of control: this game is close to doing to loot RPGs what Donkey Kong 64 did to collectathon platformers, with just as many color variants to its tchotchkes. There's also the aforementioned rush through all the jobs, without enough time to fully absorb the approach to using them effectively. Yet, I have to admit that Stranger of Paradise's particular brand of crossover insanity is exactly what I was looking for from both this franchise and format—if not all the time then at least some of the time—since "playing it too safe" is a sin most Final Fantasy games have done a tremendous job in avoiding up until now (even X-2 and the XIII sequels, despite recycling a lot of assets, were so damn weird both structurally and narratively to compensate). (Rating: 5 out of 5. Yes, I'm crazy.)
(Plus, Stranger of Paradise really does know its FF lore: For instance, there's a side-quest inside a dungeon inspired by the tomb from Final Fantasy XII where you have to open random chests hoping to locate the one containing a specific spear. I found that very amusing.)
What else have I been playing in March? Well, I'm ashamed to admit this, but I fell into a deep P-Hole this month. That is to say, a picross hole. (There's probably a better way of phrasing that.) Continuing the above theme of pursuing a personal goal of playing one Final Fantasy game per year of the franchise's existence, Pictlogica: Final Fantasy is a F2P 3DS picross game devised by Square Enix and picross Picassos Jupiter Corp that functions similarly to their later F2P Pokémon Picross in that you can absolutely play it for free but it'll just randomly insist on making you wait for long stretches unless you fork up a small fee to hurry things along. It's one of the more obnoxious developments in the F2P market that'll have you wishing for a season pass, but it suits my purposes since I'm fine with playing picross games stretched out across a long duration. I tend to get too attached otherwise, as I'll get into in a moment.
Like Pokémon Picross (or similar FF spin-offs like Theatrhythm), Pictlogica found a novel and germane way to integrate standard Final Fantasy RPG aspects such as character progression, party dynamics, and tactical real-time battles. Occasionally, when you complete a picross and it happens to be the portrait of a playable character, you can take part in a "quest" where you have to defeat several waves of enemies followed by a boss to unlock that character for use. You do this with a team comprised of your currently available characters, which you can level up with special gems you collect by completing conditional goals when taking on the regular picross mode (where the assignment might be "turn the assist modes off" or "complete under this time") and the quest mode ("complete the battle with only sword-users/female characters/fewer members than usual"). Levels are capped until you make further progress in the game, and there are battles which are way too tough for your current party that often involve recruitable villain characters like Golbez and Gilgamesh, so there's spots where you might need to come back later for a particularly tough playable character recruitment quest. I've been gravitating towards my personal favorites when it comes to the party, but there's a few like Bartz (who cares about Bartz?) where I'm motivated to keep them around because of their useful skills—he has a strong opening attack called Barrage that activates whenever you use him first. The way these battles work, incidentally, is that they generate little five-by-five picrosses that you're meant to complete as quickly as possible: keeping up a decent pace without making mistakes quickly increases a "break" gauge that, when reached, causes additional damage to monsters with your attacks similar to how the mechanic is employed in Final Fantasy XIII and a few later games.
Sorry about the image quality, I borrowed this from a Fandom wiki (we're part of the same family, it's fine).
Between those artificial timers meant to gouge money from impatient players and just the way I tend to approach picross games in general, I imagine I'll be chipping away at Pictlogica for a while to come yet rather than hashing it out across a handful of lengthy sessions. Once I finally exhaust its content I'll be relieved (in maybe an odd OCD way) to update my "35 in 35" list to a "37 in 37" one. Those numbers gotta match, man, they just gotta. (Rating: 4 out of 5.)
Continuing to push even further down my P-Hole, I've also been playing a fangame called Zelda Picross. Now, this is not the Zelda Picross that Nintendo themselves put out on 3DS exclusive to My Nintendo patrons to celebrate the release of Twilight Princess HD for Wii U, but rather one devised by Zelda fangame creator Vincent Jouillat as a spin-off of sorts to his series of A Link to the Past ROM hacks. It borrows the graphics of that venerable SNES paragon here too, only in the service of around a couple hundred picross puzzles. It's a fairly ingenious take on both The Legend of Zelda and picross in how it'll block off areas of dungeons and the overworld until you have the right item or a necessary key, but at almost all points there's usually more than one path to keep exploring if a path is blocked. Some upgrades open up routes where you can proceed further (like the hookshot or bombs) but others (like the Pegasus Boots or Book of Mudora) provide features to make the puzzles easier instead as they ramp up in size and difficulty.
Boxes! Why hasn't this been a thing before now? Have I just been playing the wrong picross games?
There's both a time limit and a mistakes limit while playing, the latter being Link's usual stock of hearts (which, of course, can be upgraded), and there's some real nice QoL features for the picrossing itself. One such example, and one I don't think I've ever encountered before, is being able to draw boxes around multiple squares at once like cells on an Excel sheet and either make them all positives (definitely part of the image) or negatives (definitely not part of the image), and that convenience can really help when the timer's looming over you. I still of course prefer no timers and letting the player screw themselves over by never correcting their mistakes, which I call "Wario Mode" after the same model in the Mario Picross series, but I can't fault how this system is utilized here. A surprisingly solid picross game and Zelda game alike—though granted it looks cheap as heck given it's made out of recycled sprites—and worth a recommend if you like either. Though, yeah, I'll admit to kinda getting hooked to it—I think I would've been done with Stranger of Paradise a lot sooner if I hadn't been so distracted with its numerical charms. (Rating: 4 out of 5.)
Oh yeah, @gamer_152 mentioned the chill bee-searching game I Commissioned Some Bees 0 in his last Lo-Fi Plays column so, since it's free, I also downloaded it and gave it a spin. The Where's Waldo genre's really taken off on Steam in the past decade or so and there's been no shortage of games where the developer just paid some artists for busy pictures of crowds and then sprinkled in a random assortment of crap for players to find. Not that I'm insinuating that this game, or the thirty or so others the dev has published on Steam in the past couple of years, didn't take a long time and much consideration to produce. Still, video games are often about realizing the sort of fantasy experiences that couldn't be recreated in the real world, and I'd say "poking hundreds of bees and not dying" is certainly one of those.
Let's check out the retro corner for this month. Hmm, yes, very old and mostly irrelevant. But enough about me, let's review all three of these regular features and see what's developed. First, our new feature that explores the mysterious WonderSwan—which I ruefully named Anyway, Here's WonderSwan without realizing I'd get that awful song in my head every time—processed and ranked another five games with a surprisingly positive result of three games I could just about follow to two that remained inscrutable due to the language barrier. Tweaking that ratio is really going to be a driving force of this feature, I suspect: I've already pored over a full master list of games for the system and, oof, maybe I would've reconsidered a few things given how many of them are text-dense RPGs, strategy games, and graphic adventures. I think it's safe to say that I completely missed the turning point when many handheld systems became dedicated RPG devices (the Vita being perhaps the most prominent example); since I don't care for playing long-session games on handhelds due to eye/hand strain it's certainly not something I'd really registered before now, but this era in time looks to have been the start of that shift. Even so, I'm having a great deal of fun unearthing all the WonderSwan's hidden treasures and will remain indefatigable in navigating its choppy anime tie-in waters to reach them.
The Mega Archive polished off October 1993 and entered November and the holiday rush of thirty years hence in earnest. We'll be stuck in the release windows of November and December for quite some time yet, and this coming month won't see us move through that list any faster as we'll be taking another break to investigate the Sega CD's no doubt fuzzy Halloween period instead. Highlights... hmm... highlights, you ask? Well, there was Columns III. I didn't know that there was a third Columns, so that was exciting to find out. I guess. I enjoyed ripping into the flagrant clone that was Awesome Possum Kicks Dr. Machino's Butt and its preachy environmentalism; I might go so far to suggest that recycling should probably end at glass and plastics and not the intellectual properties of others. The actual best game of that group was almost certainly Disney's Aladdin, being the polished platforming classic that it is, but the dark fantasy pinball sequel Dragon's Revenge seemed like a valid contender too.
Finally, we have this month's episode of 64 in 64. Similar snag here as with the WonderSwan feature in that I bumped into one of the very few N64 games that required a high degree of Japanese literacy to enjoy, given Yakouchuu II: Satsujin Kouro is a visual novel, but all the same it's the only game of its type for the system so for the novelty factor alone I was eager to give it a try regardless. You can see how well I struggled with some translation woes by checking out that episode. The other game, selected by me, also indirectly homages that WonderSwan feature somewhat in that it's a fun (albeit in short sessions) puzzle game of the type that has (so far) been the best the WS has had to offer. Bust-a-Move '99—or Bust-a-Move 3 DX or Puzzle Bobble 64 depending on your territory of origin—sees Taito's bubble-bursting, accuracy-demanding series make its second appearance on the N64 and was surprisingly packed with content given how relatively shallow most block-stacking puzzle games of the era tended to be.
Your hint for the next 64 in 64 pair: The pre-select pick is a game I've referenced in over half the episodes so far, while the random pick is yet another untranslated JP exclusive I'll have to feel my way through (but given its subject matter I imagine I'll do just fine this time).
Super close-run thing this month, since all of the IGotWs were strong "four out of five"s: exceptional games that were just missing out on true greatness due to one drawback or another. Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (#360) takes the crown this time just because it had some unanticipated depth to what looked, at first blush, like a meme-y Zeldersatz. In retrospect, the Undertale comparison was apt: that game captured the imaginations of those that played it due to its emotional depth and sometimes dark and sometimes hopeful twists, but since everyone walked away from that game convinced they'd experienced something special that they'd never want to spoil for others (beyond, "hey play this game") it ended up having its dumber and less essential moments turned into references that could be shared between the faithful and outsiders alike. I could see Turnip Boy having the same kind of internet presence had it been a skosh more substantial, but even as a lesser product it proved to be a similarly potent package of a great and bizarre soundtrack, some decent puzzles to decipher, and some wraught moments I definitely did not see coming in a jokey game about a felonious vegetable.
As to the runners up, we have a pretty solid "exploraction game" ("explormer" wouldn't really work in this case) Depths of Sanity (#359) which has the more uncommon free-movement approach seen in other sub-aquatic games like Aquaria and Song of the Deep. Bit more of a story focus as you delve deep underwater into what is essentially R'lyeh to find out what happened to your submarine crew of misfit The Abyss scientists and engineers; everything outside of that was decent too, from the exploration to combat, though graphically it was a bit underwhelming.
We also had This Way Madness Lies (#361) a typically excellent example of Zeboyd's compact 16-bit JRPG throwback design at work. Maintaining the comedic flair they're best known for, they dip into Shakespeare's works to create a magical girl pastiche where the heroines from those plays live their lives as regular highschool girls one moment and then magically change to fight monsters in other dimensions the next. Definite "monster of the week" flavor to its episodic approach and some catchy VGM with lyrics, building on the musical aspirations exhibited in Cosmic Star Heroine's memorable set-piece with the live band performance. Really, though, the star of the show is how the meta seems to change after every battle, as characters learn new skills and passives that focus their strengths elsewhere, meaning your approach to their role in combat could shift by the minute. It's an impressive feat of "ADHD RPG design" and continues to be Zeboyd's most prominent contribution to the throwback RPG market.
Finally, we have the vaguely antagonistic physics platformer I Am Fish (#362) that tasks you with escorting four fishy friends to the ocean by fishhook or by fishcrook. The game never stops throwing inventive scenarios at you that test your skills and patience alike, though the frequent physics engine "boo-boos" can really throw a spanner into any carefully conceived plans: trying to speedrun the game for the time trial achievements is often an irritation due to this engine's mercurial whims. I did eventually discover the "next checkpoint" button: this will void any time trial scores you were trying to earn, but is at least helpful for grabbing missing collectibles or the more stage-conditional achievements—or, if you're a casual player, skip the sequences that you simply don't have the energy left to take on after so many failed attempts. Think of it like those EA Trials games, only with more guppies rolling around in fishbowls.
(I still have one more IGotW for March but I'll punt the post-script for that into next month's edition of this feature. Kinda like when a game arrives in December too late for the GOTY deliberations.)
The Bonus Indie: The Looker (Subcreation Studio, 2022)
As ever, the Bonus Indie is a place where I can stash indie games that wouldn't really fit the IGotW feature for one reason or another. In The Looker's case, that's because it's an elaborate hour-long shitpost at the expense of Thekla's The Witness. You might even say it's the modern equivalent of Pyst: the idea being to take a first-person puzzle-adventure game with, let's say, a certain amount of pretension and then replace all instances of erudition with crude jokes and sarcasm. That said, The Looker does a few similar "thinking outside the box" puzzles that not only elevates it closer to "actual game" status but would also suggest the developer aimed for this to be a bit more of an affectionate parody than it would first appear.
In The Looker you're dropped inside a futuristic tunnel that leads out into a medieval courtyard filled with monitors plugged together in a daisy chain series. Each monitor only comes alive when the previous one in the chain has had its puzzle completed: invariably, these puzzles involve drawing one continuous unbroken line from a start point to an end point (or the end point to the start point, if you're feeling nasty). The puzzle difficulty isn't as humorously easy as it initially seems and the game will still throw the occasional melon-scratcher your way. One instance in particular required me to take notes about specific symbols, which was a level of investment I didn't anticipate from a parody game. That said, it's about a fifth the length of The Witness and really only exists to deliver some goofs at Mr. Blow's expense for the most part. The parody element is felt (or rather, heard) most keenly through the audio logs lying around: in the original game they were quotes from famous geniuses or classical literature, whereas here they're mostly specious stream-of-consciousness ramblings that only vaguely resemble something an academic might say.
Nailed it.Wha... I... I was just looking for the tourist information. I can't see a Starbucks anywhere.This one's probably a real quote.
I actually found the game pretty funny for the most part, though most of that comes from my antipathy towards The Witness and its barfy lack of UI, and the puzzle variety turned out to be surprisingly involved. One memorable instance has you playing a version of Snake (called Snek, because internet) with the same rules as the other line puzzles, which required some expert-level Snake strats to solve. Given the game is free, it practically serves as an elucidating demo for what The Witness is all about so I hope Blow's team didn't take too much offense to its (mostly) gentle ribbing. It's a whole lot better than Pyst was, at least. (Rating: 4 out of 5.)
The Weeb Weeview
This month on the Weeb Weeview: Cute shit. Promised, delivered.
First up is Fluffy Paradise, an isekai about a tired office lady who collapses from exhaustion (the truck drivers union was on strike, I guess) and wakes up as Neema, the newborn daughter of the noble Osphe family. Her wish for her new life is to be surrounded by "mofu mofu": fluffy animals she can hug to her heart's content, and it helps that her new kid form is exceptionally cute enough that beasts and people alike are naturally drawn to her Disney-style. We do get a lot of cute animals—and not just fluffy ones either; one of the first animals Neema charms is an enormous ancient dragon—though the show's kinda weird about determining how precocious an adult trapped in a child's body would be. Sometimes she's clearly sharper than the average 3-5 year old but other times she's entirely at the mercy of our own childlike whims—I guess the show excuses this as being an adult consciousness in a child's brain, prone as it is to doing whatever the hell it feels like no matter how petty or self-injurious.
'Fluffy' is more a state of mind for a few of these guys.
The show's kinda interesting in how it recontextualizes Neema's wish from "cute animals to pet, plz" to "savior of the noble monster races through her endless reserves of empathy and goodnaturedness", which I guess would need to be the hook given the genre and how there'd be too little conflict otherwise, but towards the end of the season she's some iconic freedom fighter rallying various monster tribes together in the face of their human oppressors and I'm left wondering how the character went from a cute animal lover to Susan B. Anime. I guess people can have multitudes. Anyway, even when fluffy kobolds are dying left and right defending their homes the show mostly keeps on message about being goshdarned adorable. Curious to see if a second season ever surfaces and whether it'll lean harder one way into this dynamic or the other.
Dangers in My Heart returned fairly quickly after its first season last year, and once again sees emo short king Kyotaro Ichikawa grow even closer still to his tall, glamorous, but mostly just an airhead classmate Anna Yamada. The show established the pair's unlikely but natural chemistry across the first season, justifying how the two might enter each other's orbits due to their various quirks and strengths aligning the right way (I made this sentence unnecessarily lewd), and the second season see them edging (I swear I'm not doing this on purpose) ever closer to actually dating. That's about it for the story, by the way: these school day romance stories tend to be mostly slice-of-life character studies more than something with an elaborate overarching plot to follow.
Possibly literally if I start becoming pre-diabetic again.
It's hard to describe exactly what makes this show so endearing. Partly it's the two leads; as is typical for shounen romance anime, the male lead is a relatable self-defeating nobody unable to appreciate his low-key qualities (the usual "be nice to girls" once again winning the day, though again the show sells it pretty well) while the female lead is an impossibly charming fruitcake who is defined mostly by her naivety, clumsiness, and bottomless stomach but also a sweetness that is occasionally a source of misery for her, as she hates feeling like she's let other people down. It's also just really well paced and animated, deeply sincere, occasionally funny (mostly the contributions of side characters, like Ichikawa's perverse moron sorta-friend Shou or his meddling older sister Kana), and nails the awkwardness of adolescent love in a way that doesn't feel pandering or demeaning or overly precocious. S'cute. Also why it's here this month.
Mr. Villain's Day Off simply follows the daily routine of the evil overlord of an extraterrestrial group of invaders looking to conquer Earth, frequently having to fight off the Super Sentai-esque hero group that thwarts their attempts. When he's not doing that, though, he's a huge fan of pandas—the only creature he intends to keep alive once his organization's fully taken over—and goes to see them at the zoo in his limited amount of free time. He also eats a lot of panda-shaped food and collects panda , and has started to become fond of other Earth animals. Pretty similar pitch as that Too Cute Crisis show from last autumn but far less wacky and animated; Mr. Villain is rarely a histrionic sort and approaches his passions with the same measured calm he approaches his battles with Earth's heroes.
Phew! Thanks pandas. Thandas.
I've only seen a few episodes of this show so far but its the real languid pace serves its deadpan humor as the villain finds ways to be less villainous every time he appears. The show also explores how he gets closer, in a manner of speaking, to the heroes as they also spend time off from superheroics in their casual clothes. The show's been slowly developing the people in Mr. Villain's orbit, from subordinates to antagonists, and how his desire to crush everything before him and laugh over the burning remains of our frequently irksome civilization (he's irritated by a lot of everyday things, only encouraging his war further) is mostly for those days when he's "on", and the days when he's "off" is mostly about eating ice cream and watching nature documentaries about pandas. I've been meaning to go back to it: now that we're in the last week of this "cour" and at least half the season's shows have ended already, it might be a prudent time to catch up.
Before wrapping this up, let's talk about some of the previous shows I've brought up on here now that they're close to finishing their current seasons (with one exception):
Solo Leveling continues to be extremely entertaining. The fight with Igris in the season's penultimate episode was one of the most electric things since, well, the last big fight scene in Solo Leveling I guess (also, best protag juggle since Pierrot le Fou). It's getting me back into hyperactive (and hyper-animated) shounen again. The series-pivotal event in the next and final episode of the season is going to explode some brains and I can't wait to see those reactions.
Delicious in Dungeon is entering its second cour and will be around in spring too, so I can't speak on its overall arc yet. Seems like the current situation will cause the quest to shift direction somewhat but for now I'm content with it being a gently amusing hangout show about cooking monsters and running afoul of various D&D tropes.
Frieren: Beyond Journey's End ended on a high note and now that it's officially the highest rated show on MyAnimeList I suspect the animation studio will be working on the next season. Seems like there's some demand at least. I know some folks were less than enthralled with the mage examination arc but it gave the show an excuse to expand its cast severalfold and to see how modern magic has changed since (and because of) Frieren's heyday. There's a certain evenly-matched mage battle during that arc with some insanely great animation, the sort where the creative team just let their imaginations run wild with visual effects akin to the dimensional stuff in the Spider-Verse movies, so I'm hoping they have more opportunities to flex those muscles in the next season.
Villainess Level 99 just kinda fizzled out in a flash—I guess the anime studio figured a second season was out of the question, so they wrote an alternative ending that was a bit nicer and more definitive than the LN's—but I still dig the pitch of "what if Daria was also Ultima Weapon and how would that affect her already miniscule HS social cachet?" and it did do some cute stuff with protag Yumiella and her obliviousness regarding her beau Patrick's overt feelings for her. But yeah, everything kinda got settled in a hurry with those last two episodes and I doubt we'll see a follow-up. I'm still on the look out for any isekais that double as deconstructions of video games—ideally with the levity such a concept deserves—but then I do also have a fondness for predictable anime trash (and I mean that in an affectionate way, like how the Mother's Basement YT channel uses the term). Just something to stick on while I eat dinner, you know? S'fine.
The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic had been pretty interesting as an isekai that avoided many of the usual tropes that tend to bring those of its genre down, so it's a little dispiriting that the big villain of this season is now shaping up to be a second (or possibly third) love interest for the protag. These things don't always have to turn into harems, you know? But nonetheless, it looks to be largely done with the current demon war storyline and plans to explore some other territories in season two, maybe expanding Usato's perspective a little more in the process. Dunno if we'll get an international conference of healers or what, but I'm always down for some worldbuilding and road-trip bonding.
My Instant Death Ability is Overpowered had some real crappy pacing towards the end there due to squeezing in too many manga volumes at once but at least it ended on a semi-decent note that, as is often the case in this unpredictable market, could work as ably as a series finale as it does a season finale. There's an arc they had to cut out which I hope they get back around to somehow—it doesn't really fit into the overarching plot, so I could see why they'd cut it, but it's also a really neat (and deeply disturbing) mini-narrative about the main character's ability's "reach"—so maybe they can turn that into an OVA to hype up a second season or something. Overall, I wish it could've been better but it's still a fun property and concept that I'll probably continue to follow via the manga.
I also said something about rating the opening themes of this season's anime last time, so here's my five favorite ranked (granted, there were many shows I did not watch):
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