Jokes and video games often have a tumultuous, challenging relationship with one another, frequently relying on internet memes and broad slapstick to maximize their placement on the ol' global humor relateability index. This tends to be more the case when the studio is foreign - this week's game comes to us courtesy of Pixelatto in Spain - because there's a built-in perception that cultural humor won't travel much further than your own country's borders. It's perhaps a minor miracle, then, that Reventure is one of the most amusing spins on a wild conceit for a deeply meta if also deeply stupid Indie game since, perhaps, McPixel or Jazzpunk.
Reventure posits a world where a local hero is tasked by the King to rescue his daughter, the Princess, from the lair of the Dark Lord using the Legendary Sword found on a nearby mountaintop. The player might then choose to follow this destined path of theirs for one of the game's endings. However, the game also has 99 other endings, almost none of which have the same degree of heroism or competency involved. Reventure is built on the same model as the auspicious Don't Shit Your Pants (by Cellar Door Games, the Rogue Legacy guys!) or the experimental IF game Aisle (by Sam Barlow, the Her Story/Telling Lies guy!) in that a single playthrough may only be minutes in length, but the sheer variety of conclusions you can attain is only limited by the player's (or really the developer's) imagination. You might take that Legendary Sword and stab the nearby kindly old man who tells you it's dangerous to go alone. You could try swinging it at a guard, or the King. You could get as far as the Princess's prison cell within the Dark Lord's castle and stab her with it, if you've already figured out the route to get there. And that's just one of many veins to mine (or poke swords through, as the case may be).
A pretty basic ending. Certainly not the last to involve the guards, though. Or your own messy execution for that matter.
The game experience is also directed by some very clever limitations and some rewarding discoveries as you continue to experiment, explore, and unlock new endings. Said limitations are due to how the inventory system works: while most heroes have bottomless pockets, your protagonist will be laden down by the weight of most of the game's gear, decreasing their maximum jump height the more pieces of equipment they have. This can often lead to some rerouting as you work out how to get to an area with a lesser jumping ability, as some gear like the hookshot will still help you get around easier despite the extra weight. Since almost every ending is canonical one way or another, and some amount of time passes between each one, the world will shift as you complete endings to reflect these changes, occasionally opening up permanent shortcuts and streamlining exploration as well as no end of small visual details (mostly pools of your own, or someone else's, blood). You'll also acquire a number of different protagonist appearances, different visual filters for the graphics, and the ability to change fundamental aspects about the game in the pause menu.
The game also has an ample hint system and, after acquiring enough endings, provides tools to help you locate the rest: a compass at first, which gives you the general direction to where the next ending will occur, and later a map to pinpoint its exact location. Worth noting that both the compass/map and the hints won't explicitly reveal what you need to do, but collectively provide a jumping off point for the player to suss out from there. Even with these boons, it's more fun to try and figure out as many endings as you can on your own initiative first, taking the time to explore your surroundings thoroughly for secret paths and trying out as many new possibilities as you can conceive. If nothing else, going back to sleep is always an option.
Macro Mountain's no easy climb, especially when zoomed out like this, but the rewards are worth it. (Of course, there are also plenty of routes *through* it as well...)
Naturally, with a game like this where the ideal playing experience is predicated so much by surprise and sudden inspiration, I'm loath to discuss too much about its inner workings or its capacity for sociopathic mayhem lest I spoil any more than I already have with the above text or the screenshots peppered throughout. It's perhaps worth noting that the game is not without its flaws: it can be annoyingly easy to trigger an "easier" ending en route to something more involved, and several endings will have you running across one end of the world to the other with obtuse goals in mind. With 100 endings, there's a lot of set-up and areas you'll be playing through many times over, notably getting to the Dark Lord's castle (where any path involving the Dark Lord or the Princess will typically need to start) on the far eastern side of the world. Some aforementioned shortcuts do make all this repeat navigation simpler and more convenient, but it'll take a few hours of finding new endings before they'll appear. The world isn't so large that a single path will ever take that long, even the more elaborate ones, but part of enjoying the game's surprises will involve an initial investment of exploring the world and understanding the map and the various routes it provides. Imagine, if you would, what would be involved in running a randomizer ROM hack: you'd need to have some significant familiarity with the attached game(s) before you can start rolling with the new changes and modifiers. Honestly though, I find reaching that level of mastery over a domain to be rewarding enough in itself, and planning out where I can go and what I can do on the fly when a platform proves just a little too high to reach or has been blocked off for some reason or another is one of the more subtle aspects of the game's appeal.
Even though it's set in Generic 8-bit Fantasy Kingdom Land, Reventure can at times feel a little too real.
If you liked the general fourth-wall-breaking silliness and unpredictable nature of McPixel, and wanted something akin to an open-world platforming adventure riffing on The Legend of Zelda and Dragon Quest with which to frame that chaotic comedic energy, then Reventure is what you're looking for. It's a game both suited to a casual audience who just want to spend a few hours trying whatever ideas pop into their heads to see if the game rewards them with a unique ending for their trouble, as well as those slightly more obsessive types like myself who want to figure out every single one of these disparate destinies via the hints, the map/compass, and their own creativity to discover what the true finishing line actually looks like. I also think it can be really funny (some endings more than others), and that's no easy feat for a video game to pull off either.
It's another action-packed entry of the Mega Archive as we enter July and the second half of 1992 for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis. The summer of '92 continues to be dominated by western debuts, but a remarkable trend emerging here (if the release data is correct, and I've taken every step to be as accurate as possible) is that many Japanese studios are launching their games States-side first, possibly because the market is so much more lucrative. As a refresher, the Mega Drive in its native land was losing badly to the Super Famicom (SNES)*, but the savvy marketing of Sega of America (and its European equivalent) and third-party support from the likes of EA meant the Genesis was still the market leader there. I've no head for commerce, but it seems like distributing to the larger and more receptive audience available in the States first makes a lot more business sense. Hey, if it keeps this Mega Drive retrospective out of endless shogi and pachinko games, I'm all for this western-weighted direction.
As for the composition of this entry's batch of fifteen, it's an eclectic bunch. We have our first ever Genesis fishing game (yaaaay), the return of the ostentatiously-named shoot 'em ups, the usual licensed dreck, a genuine collector's item, anime dodgeball, and - to fit with the theme of the month - a gory horror favorite. We also have an RTS game and a Westwood Studios game this entry, but they're not the same item. Sorry C&C fans.
(* This Wikipedia page gives you an idea of the amount of contrast between the one-sided Mega Drive vs. Super Famicom battle in Japan and the more evenly matched war waging in the US between the Genesis and SNES. In Japan, the Mega Drive sold only 3.5 million units to the SFC's 17 million; in the US, both systems were around 22-23 million, with the SNES squeaking ahead due to a longer lifespan.)
I'm going to have to make a shorter version of this list soon, damn:
Premise: Not many action heroes are inspired by the Chernobyl disaster, but Atomic Runner Chelnov is no ordinary action hero. (They later retconned it, of course. Thousands of deaths by radiation-induced cancer can suck the fun out of anything.)
Availability: Nothing more recent than a Japan-only Wii Virtual Console release. Paon owns the rights to Chelnov and Karnov after buying a lot of Data East's catalog, but they've been quiet for a while. Chelnov the character, however? He can be seen in the crowd in Windjammers 2, so he's doing just fine chillin' and watching some frisbee.
Preservation: Atomic Runner always felt like Data East's take on a Strider or Contra - it moves at a clip and bombards the player with enemies and visual stimuli, which is partly why it's such a challenging game. Much like sharks, I'm not sure Chelnov is allowed to slow down. Atomic Runner is also one of those games where people are much more familiar with the home version than the arcade version. That's a testament to how well it was ported over: the most significant changes are mostly superficial, like the new less-insensitive story about a pre-human civilization named the "Deathtarians" (which sounds like a diet where you only eat corpses) and some reworked backgrounds to befit the new lore. Chelnov had an interesting history post-Genesis: for its Sharp X68000 computer port, it came with a peripheral that allowed you to play it with a Genesis controller (this adapter was also compatible with a few other X68k arcade ports), and it was also going to see a Saturn port before that got cancelled close to completion (though a prototype has since emerged).
JP Release: 1993-02-26 (as J. League Champion Soccer)
NA Release: September 1992 (as World Club Soccer)
EU Release: July 1992 (as European Club Soccer)
Franchise: N/A
Genre: Soccer
Theme: Soccer
Premise: Soccer is soccer, regardless of which part of the world it's being played in. They sure punted this one around though.
Availability: Just play FIFA 21 instead, unless you're really dead set on playing as Yugoslavia.
Preservation: A UK-developed port, or reworking, of a computer soccer sim based on Manchester United FC, European Club Soccer (which came first) had an ambitious 170 teams taken from various European leagues. The American version uses national teams instead, as America only pays attention to soccer (if ever) during the World Cup. Japan's version not only uses their own J. League, but actually bothered to acquire the licenses to use those team and player names; in a sense, theirs is the most legit version, though it only has the ten teams instead of 170. Also, why are Game Arts putting this jank soccer game out in Japan? You just made Lunar! Rest on your laurels, why don't you.
Premise: Hook up the world's largest salmon in this, the first fishing simulator for the Mega Drive. (The "Big Catch" here is that fishing games are tedious.)
Availability: No ports or rereleases have made their way upstream as of yet.
Preservation: HOT-B are back, doing what they do best. They first cast their lines on the NES with the Black Bass series, and presumably they figured they should be switching fish if they were switching console manufacturers. Hard to say if the NA release date is accurate here: my usual source took that date from the April '92 issue of GamePro, but a 1993 credit to Sage's Creation (HOT-B's American publishing subsidiary) on the title screen suggests otherwise. GameFAQs has a March '93 date but I've no idea where they sourced it from, so... shrug? Feel like I've been fishing harder for some definitive release info than I have for the salmon. Final note: I like the idea that someone decided they should use a salmon-colored font for the word "salmon" on the box art, which was then nixed at the last moment because it was the early '90s and everything had to be hot pink on teal.
Premise: The West Mansion is a smoking ruin, but Rick still left some things un-smashed with his trusty two-by-four.
Availability: There's the Wii Virtual Console rerelease from 2008, and Splatterhouse fans might also want to check out the 2010 360/PS3 series reboot if they somehow haven't already.
Preservation: We talk a lot about console exclusivity in this day and age, rather than developer exclusivity which was more the case in the 16-bit era, and one of earliest examples of the former was Namco deciding to make Splatterhouse sequels solely for the Mega Drive, given Sega was a little more amenable to its blood-and-guts B-movie charms than the family-focused Nintendo. Both Splatterhouse 2 and Splatterhouse 3 would remain on Sega platforms until their inclusions on the Wii Virtual Console many years later. Splatterhouse 2 isn't all that complicated a gaming experience, and still maintains an arcade sensibility despite only being on home console. Probably best they didn't complicate the simple joys of hitting a ghoul in the face with a club until it explodes into viscera.
Premise: Upon hearing a tale about Tasmania's enormous prehistoric seabirds, Taz decides to seek out their eggs to make a giant omelet.
Availability: Licensed platformer, so I doubt it's coming back unless Warner Bros. decides to "The Disney Afternoon Collection" its wide range of questionable Looney Tunes games.
Preservation: Despite the Taz character's enduring popularity and the familiar format of smart-ass meta humor delivered through disconnected skits, you don't hear about Taz-Mania as much as you might a Tiny Toons or Animaniacs. I wonder if the Antipodean humor made it a little alienating to American audiences? Also why was Taz's father based on Bing Crosby? What age group was that cartoon aiming for, exactly? Anyway, I'm talking about the show because I've very little to say about this generic mascot platformer beyond that it probably helped pave the way for Crash Bandicoot - pretty much the same character only with enough dignity to cover up his shame with a pair of denim cargo shorts - and that the SNES Taz-Mania game is completely different (it's a racing game? Sorta?). Not for nothing, but "Recreational Brainware" is a fantastic developer name and it's a pity they never put anything else out... well, except the company did have a hand in a certain upcoming game starring an undead anti-hero. It won't be Forever, Man, before we reach him.
Premise: America's favorite game show, or at least its favorite game show where you don't need to know anything, is coming to Genesis! And Game Gear, and SNES, and NES, and Game Boy, and...
Availability: It seems like every decade someone gets their hands on the Wheel of Fortune license and puts something out. I think Ubisoft had it last?
Preservation: I mean, this is exactly what you think it is. A home version of a TV quiz show, which I've no doubt was one of the prizes of the actual quiz show for a while. One thing I learned about this game, despite having dealt with it once already while working on SNES pages, is that it was developed in the UK despite being a North American exclusive release. That means there were plenty of British English spellings to baffle those poor American kids who were already confused about receiving this as a birthday gift from relatives they had previously thought loved them, though I'm sure all those extra "U"s everywhere wasn't a concern in a game like this where words and spelling play such minor roles. Rest assured, we'll be seeing many more TV show adaptations from GameTek yet (and, uh, Zool apparently).
Premise: Are you ready for some high-octane anime dodgeball? The correct answer is no. Nobody is ready for high-octane anime dodgeball.
Availability: Nothin' doin'. Another licensed game, based on a property that is a complete unknown outside of Japan (and, I'm guessing, inside of Japan beyond a certain period of the 1990s).
Preservation: Honoo no Whatsit is going to be a major pain in my ass in the near future, since it was one of those hot manga/anime licenses that everyone had to have on their console of choice. The license thus got spread around to many different developers (Sega, Sunsoft, Hudson, AIM, and SIMS), producing six marginally different versions of the same game that probably all deserve to have separate pages. It doesn't help that they all play the same too: though there are graphical differences they all look like Technos's Super Dodgeball, which I guess was the only other dodgeball game in town.
Premise: 16-year-old ace cadet Lucia is determined to rescue her father from the aliens that teleported his frigate to destinations unknown, even if it means stealing Earth's most advanced starfighter to do so. Way to guard the ship from a single teenage girl, idiots.
Availability: Your best bet is either the Wii Virtual Console, which was the game's only international release, or a recent (2019!) reissue of the original Japanese cart from Columbus Circle.
Preservation: Gley Lancer was one of those high-value Mega Drive carts, between its relative rarity (it's Japan-only) and, I suppose, Masaya's penchant for fancy anime showmanship. Like Zero Wing, there's a whole introductory sequence with dialogue and dramatic editing to get you into the swing of things, and then it's business as usual with a menu of different option systems and some attractive but generic horizontal shoot 'em up action. The Wii Virtual Console once was again the hero of the retro preservation scene, distributing Grey Lancer for the first time to the unwashed masses of the western continents in 2008 to the chagrin of whichever chumps paid ¥10,000 to import it.
Premise: Follow the Brazilian F1 superstar around some of his favorite tracks in this newly endorsed outing for Sega's arcade Monaco GP series.
Availability: While a popular first-party game at the time, being endorsed by Ayrton Senna complicates matters. Not like you can just call him up and ask for likeness rights these days...
Preservation: I'm not going to lie, this one's not really worth anyone's time today unless they're already dedicated to Formula 1 or have any affinity for the unfortunate Sr. Senna. It still has some of Sega's arcade-y racing game sensibility, as evinced by an automatic transmission setting (aren't those banned in F1 now?), but there's plenty of serious simulation elements in this series too, more so once they got a professional driver involved to supervise. Still, if you were a documentarian charting the evolution of Formula 1 video game adaptations (i.e. Danny O'Dwyer, the only person I could imagine doing this), Super Monaco GP II seems like an important inclusion.
Premise: Help the dinosaurs stave off their inevitable annihilation for a couple extra million years by chomping on some alien invaders.
Availability: Besides the original MD cart, there was also a Wii Virtual Console release in 2007. Both are Japan-only though.
Preservation: We've talked about CRI before - they were the brainchild of CSK (the IT parent company of Sega between 1984 and 2004) and used their nerdy tech knowhow to help usher in Sega's CD-based future with the Mega CD and subsequently the Saturn and Dreamcast, and post the Sega hardware age they became ubiquitous middleware developers. They would on occasion put out games too, including this RTS game where dinosaurs fight aliens. There are five dinosaurs that the player generates by spending resources like they might troops in Warcraft, each of which serves a distinct role from gathering energy to tanking enemies to quickly eating alien eggs so they can't spawn reinforcements, and the player can also assist their side Populous-style with beneficial weather effects. It seems a bit rudimentary and goofy compared to RTS games today, but it's worth remembering that mid-1992 is still the prehistoric (as it were) era for the genre, since the big games that would go on to define it - Dune II, Command & Conquer, Warcraft - had yet to be released.
Premise: Thunder Force III saw the destruction of the genocidal ORN Empire, but suddenly they're back again. Like they always say, there's one ORN every minute.
Availability: Thunder Force fans are in luck - #4 was recently added to the Sega Ages range for Switch.
Preservation: Technosoft was one of the Mega Drive's earliest third-party supporters and their flagship Thunder Force franchise has always been something of a technical showcase, able to demonstrate the tech of the system at its peak as effectively as Sega themselves. Despite being saddled with a bizarrely terrible name for its US localization and only its US localization (is that a typo? Or was the ship baked with self-raising flour?), it's one of the more attractive games to be released on the Mega Drive especially by what was available in 1992. I've always been terrible at shoot 'em ups and am largely ambivalent whenever one shows up on this list, but between their speed and the sheer number of on-screen sprites involved they're good litmus tests for how well a developer understands the console they're developing for.
Premise: Apprentice witch Saria must rescue the sages from evil forces with all the destructive elemental forces an anime teenager can conjure.
Availability: No rereleases, original Japanese cart only. This one's pretty rare too.
Preservation: It feels like every 16-bit console had its own Japan-only fan-coveted anime magical girl cute 'em up games. The TurboGrafx-16 had Magical Chase, the SNES had Cotton 100% and Magical Pop'n, and the Mega Drive got theirs with 1992's Twinkle Tale. One major departure from its peers is that Twinkle Tale has a Commando/Ikari Warriors top-down perspective where your character is on foot, presumably having not yet passed broomstick training. I'm a little more partial to games of this type, especially as a break from all the sci-fi shoot 'em ups, and it's a fine looking game if a bit grainy. The bosses are the usual highlights here, each one filling the screen with its bulk and endless amounts of projectiles, though a generous power-up and weapon-switching system alleviates to some degree the frustrating downgrading that comes after getting hit. It didn't quite garner the cult following of its aforementioned magical girl compatriots, never seeing a rerelease or remaster of any kind, but it did receive an English fan translation back in 2007 at least.
Premise: A kingdom on the verge of goblin conquest is suddenly thrown into a strange new world with a red sun. Who loses a war with goblins? You'll find out once you roll up a party and get wiped by the first normal-sized snake you meet.
Availability: Probably too many licensing issues around this one to see a rerelease, since both Wizards of the Coast and Sega would need to get involved. It's up to Westwood IP owners EA if they want to work that all out.
Preservation: During the early '90s, we saw an unusual trend by D&D license holders to explore the more obtuse settings and campaigns of the famous table-top game, beyond the more well-established worlds of the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance. Between 1992 and 1994 we had the first games based on Ravenloft (vampires), Spelljammer (space), Al-Qadim (genies), Dark Sun (shirtless gladiators), and Mystara ("classic flavor" D&D). The last of those is where we find Warriors of Eternal Sun, which for an extra layer of esoterica is set in Mystara's "Hollow World": an inverted land inside the middle of Mystara's planet, populated by dinosaurs and beastmen races. Beyond that, it plays a little like a fusion of SSI's Gold Box and Origin's Ultima, in particular adopting Ultima IV-VII's distinctive oblique top-down perspective everywhere except its first-person dungeons. Despite sharing a lot of mechanical similarities with its CRPG brethren, Warriors of the Eternal Sun was exclusive to the Sega Genesis. (Couple of extra notes: Westwood also made another console-only D&D Mystara game the same year with Order of the Griffon for TurboGrafx-16. Mystara is also the campaign setting Capcom used for their D&D arcade brawlers, but I forget if either of those ever went to the Hollow World.)
Premise: Defend your lands by building walls and forts for all the enemy ships to knock down with their cannons. You can knock them down with cannons too though, so it's all fair and shit.
Availability: Rampart been rereleased many times, including in the Midway Arcade Treasures compilation for PS2/Xbox and Midway Arcade Origins for PS3/360. I'm sure you can find it on iOS these days too, probably under a legally distinct name.
Preservation: Tengen's still at it, porting over every Atari arcade game they can dig out of the dumpsters outside of the Dave & Buster's (I kid; at the time Rampart was still fairly new). I always liked Rampart, but I think that's because I always liked Tetris and shooting cannons at boats, so maybe the ingenuity of its hybrid format was lost on me at the time. Rampart could be considered the ancestor to the entire tower defense genre, especially in the way it separates the "building" and "defense" modes into two ever-alternating halves. The Genesis port is fine enough, but this is a game served better by the original arcade cabinet's trackball or a mouse given the precision required by both the building and shooting modes. Nothing worse than building 90% of a fort's circumference only to leave a gap because you hit confirm in the wrong place.
Premise: If you want to risk life and limb for a chance to win a hundred VCRs, Smash TV is the bloodsport game show of the future for you!
Availability: I would've said the XBLA version since it has online multiplayer, but that got delisted a decade ago. Shows how tuned in I am.
Preservation: Let's be real, while the home versions of Smash TV (many of which were called Super Smash TV, despite having no obvious enhancements) were fun in spurts you lose a lot trying to port a dual-stick shooter to consoles that don't even have the one stick on their controllers. I realize this ain't dancing with the one what brung ya, but I think the SNES version fares slightly better as a compromise because its diamond-formation face-buttons function as a second D-pad for multidirectional shooting. In comparison, the Genesis controls are just... weird. Instead of trying to assign the three buttons to directions (hope you don't need to shoot down!), they'll either shoot in the direction you're moving, or the opposite direction, or toggles a locked firing mode (which is a configuration the Mega Drive sometimes used with shoot 'em ups, like Gley Lancer above). If you wanted more shoot buttons, you could choose to play the "1 player, 2 controllers" mode which I'm not sure will make your life any easier. I got burned a number of times as a kid with a much-anticipated arcade or computer console conversion that didn't quite work out (in retrospect, expectations were perhaps absurdly high for a decent SNES Theme Park), so I feel for any kid at Christmas forced to adjust to the console limitations this port exposes.
A third of my Indie Game of the Week itinerary are "huh, what is this?" impulse buys, a third are leftover bundle inclusions I naturally seem to accrue like a rock gathers moss (unless it's rolling, of course), and the third are purchases I attribute to the knowledgeable vox populi of this very site. Battle Chef Brigade, a game all about cooking monsters, was rated very highly by the Giant Bomb community (including Ben Pack, who placed it 7th in his GOTY list) in the already competitive year of 2017. For whatever I reason, I was laboring under the illusion that it was another Valkyrie Profile-inspired action-RPG from screenshots (there's been a number of those lately, not that I'm complaining): it is, in fact, a brawler with relatively little RPG seasoning that instead uses a fusion of match-three puzzle gameplay to complete a richly versatile flavor profile. (Sorry for the terminology; this always seems to happen with cookery shows.)
The titular Battle Chef Brigade is a royal unit of warrior chefs who not only keep the peace by fighting off the ever-present hordes of monsters everywhere, but turns their meat and other by-products into delicious meals for all to enjoy. The brawler part has you hunting these monsters down with a selection of battle skills and spells, collecting their spoils, and carting them back to the kitchen pantry. With enough ingredients, the player can then drop them one at a time into a skillet and juggle around the various colored gems to maximize the "score" of the resulting meal. As most of the game revolves an Iron Chef style contest, both halves of this process are strictly timed, with the player shrewdly rationing their time between gathering ingredients and cooking up the meal, and it only becomes more chaotic when the game introduces multiple judges to appease, and thus multiple meals to create. You're able to prepare for these contests, somewhat, with a selection of equippable items: some assist with the hunting (e.g. new techniques, more health or mana), ingredient usage (e.g. sauces, which change the elemental composition of the meal), and the cooking itself (e.g. different pans and cookware, including slow cookers where you can leave meals to improve gradually on their own while you go out hunting). There's a wide variety of items to suit any approach, including those that reward bonus score by completing extra objectives, or maybe if you crash and burn on one challenge you can re-enter with equipment that improves your odds on the next attempt (say, a fire-element focused meal challenge would benefit a lot from bringing in fire-element focused gear).
My favorite part of the competitions are these overly theatrical introductions to the contest, the judges, and the "theme ingredient" for the contest by Fantasy Chairman Kaga here. Cooking is very serious business in this world.
The cookery contests are also wisely broken up with some smaller challenges, framed here as temp work that Mina performs to afford new tools and ingredients for her future bouts. These include two jobs that focus purely on the match-three puzzle aspect: one has the "puzzle" mode sometimes found in games of the block-matching genre, where you need to reach the target goal with a fixed arrangement of gems and moves and must carefully suss out the correct path to take, and the other has you complete a series of gem arrangements as quickly as possible in succession. The third focuses on the combat instead, teaching you your character's techniques and how best to take down tough or maneuverable foes. They all serve to improve your skills for the competition, but feel distinct enough that they also provide a small reprieve between the high-stress chef showdowns.
I also want to mention the game's remarkable presentation. In addition to being one of the most wholesome games I've played - your protagonist Mina Han is in direct competition with a number of talented chefs from all over this vaguely fantasy world, almost all of whom she befriends immediately despite the stakes (and steaks) - the anime-styled art direction and hand-drawn graphics are uniformly excellent, with some catchy and suitably epic (for a cooking contest, at least) music throughout. The story takes some unexpected detours also, slowly building up a potential catastrophe in the backdrop of the competition and everyone's involvement in trying to fix the issue. It's a mature form of storytelling in the more egalitarian sense of a group of smart, empathetic people working together to calmly and scientifically address a problem, making the occasional missteps along the way and sparking relatable conflicts. I was definitely expecting something a lot sillier and broader given the premise, though there's plenty of levity throughout (an overly sensitive orc patisserie chef, for instance, or a girl who is followed everywhere by her teapot mech).
The game is constantly introducing new wrinkles to its extant systems. These cracked gems vanish if you move them too many times, so you need to quickly plan around that. Poison and bone fragments can also create (non-)tasty problems.
Like any good meal, Battle Chef Brigade is a lot more than the sum of its many ingredients; an attractive and compelling hybrid of two disparate genres framed with the fast-paced anxiety and mouth-watering culinary expertise of an Iron Chef cookery contest, and many little features and mechanics that serve that central conceit. It definitely feels like they started with the concept and worked backwards, but still pulled it off adroitly. Yet another delicious morsel hidden in the massive feast of quality titles that 2017 brought to our collective tables.
I desisted with the self-indulgent monthly updates a long while ago, but I miss writing about the games I don't already cover with my Indie Game of the Week series and occasional Tuesday/Wednesday blog. My general habits at this point are to alternate between Indies and the more... well, if I say substantial it's usually only in the longevity sense. Certainly, at least, these are games people will be more familiar with.
I'm not going to suggest that the past three months since the June "Mid-Year Check-in" update have been much improved from the preceding three, as we're now two seasons deep into this pandemic that neither the US nor the UK government is empathetic or competent enough to properly deal with. Fortunately for the US, they'll have an opportunity to change leadership very soon, though I shudder to think that we Brits are still going to be stuck with this malevolent talking pile of attic insulation for years to come.
Anyhoo! I've been trying to fill the void in my soul with various entertainment media, including the following (warning - long):
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Spirit of Justice
I have this weird habit of putting off playthroughs for the last released games in franchises I enjoy, because it's reassuring to know I'll always have something "new" from that series to look forward to. The Ace Attorney franchise has been a highlight of my portable gaming since the mid '00s, when the original Japanese GBA game made its way to DS and subpoena'd up a small but zealous fanbase with its distinct bifurcated adventure game format and broad Japanese silliness. 2016's Spirit of Justice is, as far as I know, presently the last core game in the series and may be for some time: it wraps up a number of threads in both Phoenix Wright's and Apollo Justice's lives while making major shifts, with Phoenix finally reconnecting with his former ward (and now fully grown spirit medium) Maya Fey while Apollo similarly reconnects with estranged adoptive family members from the foreign land in which he was raised.
Definitely a game worth checking out if you've been keeping up with the series thus far, but if that's the case you hardly need my recommendation to see how Phoenix Wright's story concludes. (4 Stars.)
Yakuza 6: The Song of Life
Talking of beloved long-running Japanese franchises which have reached a denouement of sorts, the summertime is when I revisit the flashy lights and seedy underbelly of Kamurocho to see what kind of scrapes Kiryu Kazuma and I can get into. Sadly, this is the last Kiryu game in the series, but given 2018's Judgment and the upcoming English language release of Yakuza: Like a Dragon (a.k.a. Yakuza 7) in November, I don't have the luxury of dithering or I'll fall way behind again. As it is, I only ever play one of these a year because of how dense they are, and by the time I've caught up in 2022 there'll probably be another one if not more.
Yakuza 6 follows Yakuza 0's general pattern of streamlining the series to just the highlights, adjusting its character progression and optional aspects like the mini-games and substories to be more accommodating to those who don't generally have the time commitment to see everything a Yakuza game has to offer. That's not to say that Yakuza 6 skimps too much on providing objectives for you to complete, but it's not going to be the 100+ hour epic saga that Yakuza 5 offered with its multiple characters, each with their own game's worth of story progression and optional buffoonery. To that effect, Yakuza 6 is the first game in the series since Yakuza 3 to go back to just Kiryu as the protagonist, and while it does split its time between Kamurocho and new destination Onomichi (a sleepy fishing town in the Hiroshima Prefecture) the latter isn't exactly packed with activities, by design; rather, it appeals to Kiryu's more middle-aged inclinations, offering a friendly local bar, amateur baseball leagues, and a quaint and relaxing fishing mini-game where you punch Jaws in the face. It still has the same uncompromisingly brutal street fights and ridiculous substories that range from slice-of-life (teach an annoying social media influencer a lesson!) to bizarre (ghost pirates?!) to those that directly reference contemporary media like The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and, uh, Freaky Friday. The core has not been compromised in any way, there's just slightly less of everything in order to, perhaps, focus more on Kiryu's eventual bowing out of the series with a personal tale regarding his adoptive daughter Haruka and her adorable infant son Haruto.
My favorite aspect of Yakuza 6 is the new Dragon engine: it feels very slick indeed and I'm looking forward to seeing it again when I play Judgment (it's also in Yakuza Kiwami 2, but I've no immediate plans to revisit those first two games). The Dragon engine not only affords more physicality to the brawling, with the added bonus of sending opponents ragdolling around the place, but the environments become fully destructible too. You can actually get into trouble dragging a street fight into a place of business, busting through the full-length windows of a Smile King burger emporium and breaking a bunch of chairs and tables in the process. It seems mostly for show - unless you're physically swinging a piece of furniture around, knocking enemies through a table or window doesn't seem to increase the amount of damage you do in any significant way - but it certainly makes the fights more visually arresting and dynamic. You've still got a (slightly reduced) array of wince-inducing Heat Actions to perform, as well as a Heat "mode" that temporarily renders Kiryu invincible that also allows him to recall some of his "Beast" techniques from Yakuza 0. And, as always, there's the Komaki Tiger Drop: much of Kiryu's Komaki training was removed as part of the new streamlined character progression system, but the (very expensive) killer counter move is still present. I can't tell you how much I relied on that tech throughout Yakuzas 1-5, but it's the "visceral attack" of the Yakuza franchise and I can scarcely imagine playing those games without it (though with Kiryu out of the picture in future entries, I suppose I'll have to).
Yakuza 6 probably falls somewhere in the middle of my overall Yakuza series ranking, but it's not a disappointment by any measure. There are highlights I'll remember (Beat Takeshi's doddering Hiroshima patriarch for one, and the indefatigable cheerfulness of mascot hero Ono Michi-kun for another) and lesser ideas I could do without (the tactical army brawling mini-game full of pro wrestlers was not for me) so while it wasn't some magnificent swansong peak for Kiryu's ten-plus year journey it was still a highly entertaining and totally competent send-off. (4 Stars.)
Wolfenstein II: New Colossus
I was planning to write a separate blog about Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus at some point before being distracted by something else, and the title would've been a Simpsons-esque "Dichtomy, Die!" ("no-one who speaks German could be evil!") because Wolfenstein II is fundamentally a game that splits its gameplay and progression focus between two diametrically opposing forces: stealth and balls-out action. Most of the combat sequences in the game are compartmentalized, so you might wander through a few empty rooms (empty of enemies, at least; the game is filled with collectibles and lore items) before coming across another group of soldiers who somehow didn't hear the ruckus a few chambers over, giving you a chance to start stealthy again. Many of these groups have one or more "commanders" that need to be removed before any of the soldiers know you're there; the reason being is that commanders can sound alarms that generate endless numbers of reinforcements that overwhelm you pretty quick, especially on higher difficulties. This makes it very unpalatable to just run and gun your way to the commander(s) and take them down, because the incurring damage numbers are far more severe here than they might be in the Doom reboot (the only other series doing this type of fast-paced shootout, besides perhaps Serious Sam and a few Indie throwbacks like Dusk), and yet the game is built in such a way to suggest either approach is valid. In fact, they kind of want you to do both: there are separate progression skill trees for both stealth and "mayhem," so I think you're supposed to alternate to get the most bang for your buck.
Anyway, my point is that a stealth game and an all-out gunfight sim have different priorities when it comes to design, from the mechanical foundations on up. Stealth games focus on perception and timing, providing the player with as much visual information as they might need to understand enemy patrols and their sight/hearing cones so that the player can move quickly and decisively when the moment is right. The stealth action genre, which I believe has reached its present apex with IO Interactive's Hitman franchise, is very much a measured, tactical affair that rewards patience, foresight, and hurried improvisation. There's an entirely different skillset - and thus different game design philosophy - for a big, loud, exciting shooting gallery; look to the recent Doom remakes for an example of how to do that right, if your focus is purely on clearing a room of enemies as quickly and as brutally as possible while mitigating health loss with rapid, often strafing movement. Various smart feedback loops - e.g. melee kills generate more ammo drops, ideal as you're usually resorting to melee only because you ran out of bullets - allow you to keep the kill train moving, and it almost becomes this ballet of blood as you glide from one gibbed monster to the next. Wolfenstein II tries to straddle this line for, I guess, not only the sake of player choice but to call back to the first two games in the series: the very stealth-focused C64 Castle Wolfenstein and the famous Doom precursor Wolfenstein 3D for DOS.
Looking outside of the gameplay, however, the game is a frequent delight. Its surreal yet sinister take on an alternative 1961 where the Nazis won World War II and have become complacent as the world's conquerors, taking to colonizing the Moon and Venus for lack of anything else to do or minorities to snuff out, is lore-rich and there's a large number of allied NPCs with their own quirks and personalities to talk to between missions. It's sometimes a joy just to explore Eva's Hammer - the enormous U-boat dreadnought turned mobile Resistance HQ - and chew the fat with the gaggle of eccentric freedom fighters that protagonist BJ Blazkowicz helped liberate, which includes the Dachau prisoners and multinational Kreisau Circle rebels from the previous game and later Grace Walker's Hidden Figures-style all-female team of codebreakers and Horton Boone's ragtag pack of Louisiana Nazi hunters. The game's episodic structure, partially designed to extend the game's longevity, means getting to revisit a lot of previous levels for new objectives and another excuse to scour the place for any missed collectibles, some of which can only be found on these return trips. I frequently found myself rushing through the combat encounters to give myself breathing room to look for more cool stuff like Nazi propaganda newspaper clips about various '50s and '60s Americana (Roswell and Area 51 feature heavily in the plot) or albums from contemporaneous musicians now forced to sing in German, and the worldbuilding - for as distressing as it is, especially in the current climate, to imagine a global leadership so right-wing - is top-notch. There's a reason, I discovered in retrospect, why the 2017 Giant Bomb GOTY discussions included an entire category on "Best Wolfenstein II Moment or Sequence": it was worth muddling through that often unsatisfying combat just to see that story play out. (4 Stars.)
Ever Oasis
I wasn't entirely sure what to expect from Ever Oasis, since it reviewed well but not that well and generally went ignored by most of the game press (including Giant Bomb) for being this niche little 3DS RPG released three months after the exciting new Nintendo Switch platform. It turns out to be a very portable-friendly version of something like Little King's Story: you're the leader of a settlement who must build it up incrementally by recruiting new citizens (this often involves a fetch quest or two) while keeping the populace happy by investing in their livelihoods. Most citizens are seedlings: a diminutive race of beings able to create tree-like structures which they turn into storefronts for various products, and the more you recruit the more money you bring to your oasis provided you can keep these merchants supplied with the materials they need. To find said materials, invite new denizens, and progress the story, you have to leave the safe confines of your oasis to run around exploring dungeons and fighting monsters in an action-RPG format.
I'll say from the outset that neither the town-building or the combat is all that compelling individually, though having you alternate between the two does alleviate this somewhat. The game is very focused on always giving you short-term goals to pursue, whether that's a side-quest to recruit a new villager or a different side-quest to upgrade one of your existing storefronts (which increases its generated revenue and product line, the latter often needing rarer ingredients) or a revisit to older dungeons with a new ability in explormer fashion. You might take a gamble on one of the game's handful of procgen dungeons, generated with a "seed" of lithograph tiles that you need to find beforehand. You could decide that you want to craft upgrades to your current weapon or accessories and go material hunting for those. If nothing else strikes your fancy, there's always another dungeon destination for the story to go, which tends to involve a lot of environmental puzzles based on seedling abilities: you can recruit two followers to join you when exploring, and you'll often need to call on their inherent skillsets to progress. To that effect, it's sort of like a Zelda game where you can only take two items with you, and they'd better be the two you need to complete the dungeon.
Fortunately, the game is nothing if not considerate to your time. Not only are there plenty of fast travel points, but you can immediately warp back and forth from the current dungeon chamber to your home oasis in case you need to swap in someone else for their unique talent, or for any other reason. You have to play for a few hours before unlocking this "Aqua Gate" town warp, but it becomes indispensable thereafter. Combat can be tough but not unmanageable, with a basic combo system of light and heavy attacks that expands as you level up; the player character also has a selection of weapon types to use, some of which like the staff and crossbow are needed for dungeon puzzles also (the staff to light up dark rooms, the crossbow to hit distant buttons). Delegating is often the key to fast-tracking some of the more item gathering-heavy aspects of the game's progression, assigning your denizens to the oasis's garden for necessary flora or sending them off in expedition teams to scour previously visited locales for their unique spoils to save yourself the trouble. There's always a lot of plates spinning but very rarely are you pressured to do any of this to make persistent forward momentum, as long as you keep your gear up to date and stack plenty of healing items. There are aspects of a sort of mobile game philosophy involved (though thankfully no microtransaction "time-savers" or anything of that nature) with the constant stream of short-term, short-duration goals to pursue, which is appealing in the sense of keeping you constantly busy with distractions, and it seems absurdly dense for what it is. I might not speak highly to any one aspect of its make-up, but as a package deal played in small bursts it's oddly riveting. (Did I also mention it's as cute as a button? Even the tribe of gluttonous scorpionmen are cuddlesome.) (4 Stars.)
Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls
Ultra Despair Girls is in some way a departure for the Danganronpa series, switching from the adventure (with occasional obnoxious hangman puzzle) gameplay to a third-person shooter, but it also feels like something you could feasibly build into the original games with their first-person exploration. Rather than a few screens of hotspots to pursue like most adventure games, the series has you traipse through mostly empty 3D environments to get to important destinations (like, say, the crime scene) so tossing a bunch of hostile Monokumas into those corridors for you to shoot along the way isn't too far afield. Stylistically, the game is as Danganronpa as the rest: there's a certain chaotic punk rock energy to the aesthetic and attitude throughout, and a story that is equal parts cynical and irreverent.
Ultra Despair Girls follows Komaru Naegi - the sister of first game's protagonist, Makoto Naegi - who is a self-acclaimed "totally normal, uninteresting highschool girl" originally captured by the first game's antagonist as incentive to force Naegi to partake in Danganronpa's "Killing Game" with fifteen other students. She and a few other captives, all relatives or otherwise important people to the cast of the first game, manage to escape but are threatened by an army of killer robotic Monokuma bears: the breakout star of the series who is half Persona 4's Teddie, half T-800, and all sarcastic sleazebag who performs an expository function similar to Jigsaw's puppet from the Saw movies. Komaru is joined by one of the survivors from Danganronpa, the "Ultimate Author" and deeply messed up Toko Fukawa, and together they work to escape the deathtrap they've found themselves in.
Ultra Despair Girls's combat revolves around a megaphone-like weapon that projects junk programming code to fry the Monokuma bots' circuitry, though it can also produce a number of other effects that the player unlocks gradually throughout the game. Some of these aid in the game's puzzles: there's an "open" function that activates door switches and other electronic devices, and a "reveal" that works like a blacklight to find secret hints and collectibles. The rest aid in the combat some way, from paralyzing a target to make it easier to shoot their weak spots (for every Monokuma, it's their left eye) to forcing them to dance (siren enemies, which normally sound alarms, will draw enemies to them while dancing, allowing you to finish them all off easily) to even temporarily taking control of them. While you don't need to rely on these additional functions in normal encounters, there are special "arcade rooms" where you're meant to solve a puzzle: destroying all the robots in a single move while evading their attention entirely. Some are easier than others, especially when you're required to use several functions in tandem. Otherwise the game is pretty reminiscent (probably deliberately) of horror-themed third-person shooters like Resident Evil 4 or The Evil Within: a lot of over-the-shoulder gunplay and sudden ambushes in dark spaces, while hoarding what little ammo and consumables are available along with vital currency for the next vendor visit. If all else fails, you can rely upon Toko Fukawa's homicidal alter-ego Genocide Jack to quickly take out a room of foes.
Despite having a more action focus, Ultra Despair Girls stills spends a considerable amount of time with expositionary dialogue and conversations between the two protagonists, building a tumultuous rapport and establishing much of the world's lore through side chats and via the occasional NPC they meet while on the run. The antagonists are a group of grade-schoolers who fancy themselves as a party of heroic RPG classes, which creates a lot of uncomfortable moments as they make pedo jokes or are implicitly killed off after you defeat their Super Sentai-like boss mecha. The story ties in quite extensively with the first Danganronpa, but there's a few Danganronpa 2 character details that might be spoiled if you play this game first, so it's ideally taken on between Danganronpa 2 and V3. I'd also suggest that it probably isn't all that essential for fans of the franchise who might not care for the new gameplay model, though I did like how it felt like a B-tier PS3 action game akin to a Lollipop Chainsaw: it feels like a long time since I've played one of those, since the B-tier has all but dissipated since. (4 Stars.)
Black Mirror
On a whim, I booted up this Gothic horror adventure game from King Art Games (who were also behind The Book of Unwritten Tales point-and-click series, which I'd highly recommend). A few of their lesser known games showed up in a THQ Nordic PlayStation Humble Bundle a couple of years ago, and have been gathering dust on my PS4's HDD ever since. Black Mirror is actually based on a Czech series of much more elaborate, if slightly outmoded, PC adventure games that revolve around a cursed manor deep in the Scottish highlands. This 2017 version is more of a reboot than a sequel, revising plot details and characters from the first game to tell the tale of David Gordon, who visits his grim family estate for the first time after the apparent suicide of his father John. The manor currently houses a couple members of David's extended family - his grandmother Margaret and cousin Eddie - as well as the curt butler Angus, ornery groundskeeper Rory, and skittish maid Ailsa. Shortly after arriving, the same sinister eldritch powers that pushed John over the edge start to dig their claws into David, and it becomes a race against time to discover the manor's supernatural secrets and avoid a similar fate.
Black Mirror lacks any manner of combat, but is otherwise similar to horror adventure games where you investigate grisly murders for the ethereal clues left behind, find secret rooms and rifle through hidden drawers, read a whole lot of documents, and interrogate NPCs. You spend a lot of time wandering through the rooms of the mansion looking for the next progression trigger, though it's thankfully not a huge place (though still a little confusing with its geography and lack of map), and the puzzles are all straightforward enough and tend to involve paying attention to visual cues and having the right items on hand. It's pretty buggy and the localization isn't always as clean as you'd hope: there's one point where the hero's journal refers to another character by a completely different name - whether it was changed in the localization or from an earlier version of the game is unclear, but it was a little strange. It also crashed regularly but auto-saved enough that it was only sort of annoying, which might be an issue inherent to a small studio porting a PC game to consoles: there's little reason to get the PS4 version over the PC otherwise, unless you want an easy Platinum.
I hold the firm belief that The Book of Unwritten Tales are some of the best modern point-and-click throwbacks, balancing some decent fourth-wall-breaking fantasy humor with a whole lot of smart, appreciated quality-of-life touches, so I was disappointed to find that Black Mirror was yet another run-of-the-mill janky adventure game without anything like, say, the distinctive uneasy weirdness of Pathologic to set itself apart. It can be attractive enough, and does a deft job visually creating scenarios like a scene where David hallucinates being underwater surrounded by the fish of the nearby loch, but in both story and gameplay terms Black Mirror a wholly unremarkable game. (Also, I didn't get attacked by an iPhone once! What kind of Black Mirror TV tie-in is this?) (3 Stars.)
Lost Sphear
I may have been a little prematurely harsh on Lost Sphear when I lambasted it in this piece regarding how faithfully it attends to its roots, to the extent that it felt like a PS1-era RPG warts and all, contrary to more interesting throwbacks coming from the Indie space that take the 16-bit or 32-bit JRPG templates of old and finds bold new directions for them. Turns out, Lost Sphear is something of a late bloomer when it comes to game mechanics, not unlike Eternal Sonata (which has a super fun combo system, but you wouldn't know that from the first twenty hours where it's hardly applicable) or Final Fantasy XIII (which is very stingy about rolling out features, right up until the end).
Lost Sphear's combat starts out kind of chaotic and unmanageable at first, with an unreasonably high level of difficulty with how bosses will hit you with the cheapest tactics. For instance, there's one boss fight that, when the boss was near death, it instantly healed back to full while hitting one of your own allies with an instant death status attack. The introduction of Vulcosuits, powerful mecha with moves that draw power from a party-wide gauge that drains very quickly, were initially too limited to be all that useful without the mid- and late-game boosts to said party-wide gauge. However, the game introduces a few important mechanics a little ways in that are easy to miss, so tossed away are their explanations and related tooltips.
The first, and more obvious, are artifacts: these are created at specific points on the world map and can provide local and global effects, from boosting physical attack power at the cost of magic attack power (or vice versa) to increasing XP or gold yield from battles to quality-of-life touches like faster overworld movement or seeing enemy health bars (both of which may have been better off being on by default). As you explore more of the world and acquire more artifact recipes, you can start tinkering around with some very powerful bonuses, though there's an insidious downside in that the majority of artifact buffs are universal: that is to say, they apply to enemies too. You can either risk giving your foes opportunities they'll exploit as often as you do, or simply stick to the power-ups that are unique to your party's capabilities (say, those that only affect Vulcosuits). My favorite was probably the one that made every encounter a "pre-emptive attack," giving you the advantage.
The second, and much more involved and potentially overpowered, are the sublimations, which are going to take a lot more explanation. The game has these Final Fantasy VII Materia-like upgrade items called "spritnite," which are used to give characters new combat skills, power-up weapons and armor, or provide passive abilities. They can also be attached to what's called Momentum Mode: your characters slowly gain a special attack currency called Momentum after giving and receiving damage or by waiting to execute their turn once their ATB gauge is filled. If you attack and hit a trigger button while you have one of these Momentum slots filled, you'll burn it off to do more damage. Simple enough so far. However, if you enhance an ability spritnite (which gives characters their skills) with a special Momentum spritnite (which you have to craft separately) you can attach additional elemental damage types, status debuffs, player character buffs, solo or group healing, and many other benefits by hitting the same Momentum trigger. This, in effect, gives you a huge amount of customization potential for each character's skillset, e.g. a big AoE attack that now also inflicts poison on every enemy, or a single-target cure spell which is accompanied by a group cure Momentum effect for maximized healing. However, you then go one munchkin level higher with sublimations: these are rarely-occurring instances where a Momentum effect applied to a skill becomes permanent, and can increase in intensity if you keep the same Momentum spritnite equipped for multiple sublimations or else diversify with multiple effects if you use the same skill with different Momentum spritnite equipped. So that same AoE skill that once poisoned every enemy might, after a few more sublimations, also slow them down, buff the user's attack power, and heal the player's entire party in one fell swoop. You can start to see just how broken a system like this might become if you remember to keep at it, switching around Momentum spritnites when they've been sublimated enough and focusing on what makes the most sense for which types of skill. A group attack skill is a good opener because more enemies are still alive at the start of a battle, so that'd be an ideal choice to slip in something debilitating like slow or petrification to keep large enemy groups from retaliating; conversely, a stronger and more expensive solo-target attack skill that you'd normally reserve for bosses would be better off with a healing spritnite effect or a defensive buff, because you're likely to see a lot of incoming damage from those high-risk battles. (Man, I said "spritnite" a lot just then. Hope it was easy to follow.)
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I won't say Lost Sphear suddenly became a Game of the Year candidate moments after I started taking sublimations seriously and had fun throwing a dozen status effects around after every turn, but it definitely helped me understand what the developers were going for with their particular spin on an ATB-style combat system. The plot, which initially had an interesting metaphysical angle to the way objects and towns appeared to blink out of existence to be replaced by a blurry white nothingness, had a few compelling seeds let down a little by some rote characterization, but it really starts to go places once you learn a little more about the world's backstory and its oddly antagonistic relationship to its own moon (which is another Final Fantasy staple, I feel) and the late-comers to the party were much more fun to use in fights. Sadly, the last two recruited characters are spoilers so I won't discuss them here, but in addition to an improved party dynamic you get a pretty decent mix of roles and skillsets with the eight characters provided (fortunately, Lost Sphear is at least enough of a modern game that it applies all XP gains universally, meaning no-one is ever too far behind if you decide to mix it up with the active party). Best of all, you don't have to put your all-rounder milquetoast protagonist Kanata in the party if you don't want to.
It's a hell of a review angle to tell people to "stick it out" when it comes to RPGs, since that implicitly asks them to dedicate twenty or more hours to a sub-par gaming experience before it "gets good," but Lost Sphear hopped from a moderately intriguing three-star RPG to a richly rewarding four-star RPG once it fully loosed the training wheels. And also, just so you don't get me wrong here, bosses continued to be absolute jerks right up until the end-game: exploiting artifacts and sublimations helped a great deal, but there were plenty of touch and go turnabout moments that felt right out of a classic Squaresoft joint. I think these Tokyo RPG Factory people know their onion(knight)s all too well... (4 Stars.)
Coming Up
I've just finished up a JRPG, so if I'm following my usual protocol I'm looking to start a CRPG next. My primary target is Obsidian's Tyranny, which is getting close to four years old now and it's been at least two since I actually bought it, but there's also Pathfinder: Kingmaker from Owlcat Games. The latter I'd been waiting on until it saw more patches (and I'm still not convinced I'll be able to run it) but seeing how it's stable enough these days, I imagine it'll be a coin flip between the two.
Ultra Despair Girls was just the aperitif to an upcoming Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony playthrough, which I intend to start sometime next month. I've heard that it doesn't continue the plot of the first two games, which is why it has the "V" next to its number: the actual Danganronpa 3 - and conclusion to the whole Hope's Peak Academy arc - is an anime series, which is honestly an equally valid medium for this franchise. Anyway, it's another 2017 game for my big checklist and an eccentric series I've enjoyed in the past, so I'm looking forward to more colorful murders and ridiculous whodunnit logic.
Moving laterally to visual novels now, I recently acquired both 5pb.'s Steins;Gate 0 continuation/"interquel" and another from the same series, Chaos;Child. They're both considerable in length - longer than actual novels, in some cases - so I might have to carve out a week for either or both this coming autumn when I'm in the mood for something more leisurely.
Other less concrete plans include starting the standard PS4 version of Dragon Quest XI in December - I'm waiting for that "S" Definitive Edition update to hit PS4, as even though it'll be a paid upgrade I'm curious if they'll patch in some of the more general quality-of-life enhancements to the standard version. I also want to see if I can grab the next Trails in the Sky (the 3rd) in a Halloween or autumn sale because playing Second Chapter earlier this year has reignited a fire to see that series through, though so far it's yet to drop more than 25%. Ditto for buying and playing Ys: Memories of Celceta on PS4 before the Ys IX localization releases early next year. I might also finally get around to some of my remaining PS3 holdovers, in particular Tales of Graces F or Catherine, since we're staring down the barrel of the PS5 launch in November. (I don't plan to get a PS5 anywhere close to launch, of course, but the PS3 is what's going to make room for it once I finally do get my hands on one.)
As for the illustrious game industry's newcomers for the last quarter of this year, or at least the handful that haven't yet been confirmed as delayed until 2021, here are my picks (with present ETAs):
Amnesia: Rebirth (October 20th): October's kind of a big wasteland, which is a shame because it's my favorite month (my birthday and Halloween occasionally show up the same week). Still, if you're looking for a spooky game for everyone's favorite holiday, a new chapter in the Amnesia series from the original The Dark Descent developers Frictional Games sounds like the perfect way to celebrate. Hopefully Abby and Vinny have it pencilled in as the finale of Six Crazy Frights this year.
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV (October 27th): Talking of finales, the final chapter of the four-part Trails of Cold Steel series joins its predecessors with a localization, though currently only for PS4. It'll be a while until I get around to it - there are six more games between ToCS IV and where I'm at - but it's an anticipated release for sure. I just hope GB doesn't decide to make the last chapter of a serial RPG that is itself the third part of a larger anthology the place they choose to start covering these games...
Watch Dogs: Legion (October 29th): Put this one down as a very tentative maybe, since I've really been on the outs with Ubisoft of late, and that was before I heard about all the abuse going on over there. Chasing out anyone who had an iota of innovation beyond "more towers to climb!" by throwing chairs at them or groping them in the bathrooms until they left or shut up explains way too much about every Ubisoft release from the past five years. However, I still plan to play Watch Dogs 2 soon (since I already bought it) and this new one's set in my home turf of the UK, so if it ends up getting rave reviews then... I'll probably still skip it anyway, but hey.
Demon's Souls (November 12th): Odd to think that November 10 and November 12 will see a huge amount of hubbub on Giant Bomb and elsewhere due to the respective console launches of the Xbox Series X/S and the PlayStation 5, and yet this Demon's Souls reboot is the only game in either launch library I have all that much interest in (all right, fine, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, that Sackboy game, and the Astro-Bot thing are other strong wishlist possibilities). I've played Demon's Souls to death already, but I'm excited to see this glorious next-gen rendition in action. Do they keep world tendency? Will they even deign to explain world tendency? How grossly incandescent will those crystal lizards look as they leap off cliffs to escape you? I'm getting chills.
Yakuza: Like a Dragon (November 10th): Oh right, I almost forgot about this. I think a recent announcement from Sega says that it'll be available on all current and next gen consoles on the 10th (or the 12th for the PS5 launch) so I'll be grabbing the PS4 version at some point soon I'm sure, though following what I said above about one Yakuza game per year it won't be until 2022 when I actually boot it up (if we're all still here of course).
Cris Tales (November 17th): I've only heard the occasional bits and pieces about this new Indie JRPG throwback, but it certainly has a look to it and I appreciate any time-travelling mechanics in my RPGs. Definite wait and see. I know I have a few friends who preordered it, so I'll annoy them for details later.
Cyberpunk 2077 (November 19th): Provided it actually does come out on its most recent "confirmed date," Cyberpunk 2077 is the year's highest profile game and not something I'm likely to avoid hearing about even I decide to demur on picking it up right away. I feel like every newly released detail that draws me to this game (Strange Days VR stuff! Keanu Reeves!) is immediately followed with some dumbass transphobia or some other equally outmoded thinking, when a game as open and futuristic and expressive as this has every opportunity to unite the whole world together... against the corporations, finally. I clearly have far too many hopes pinned to this thing.
Twin Mirror (December 1st): I'm falling far behind on DONTNOD - I haven't looked into Tell Me Why yet, nor Life is Strange 2 - but it sounds like their games haven't dipped in quality at all. As a lifelong adventure game fan fascinated by the myriad new methods with which developers explore narratives in the modern Indie age, I'm inclined to eventually play everything they're putting out, including this upcoming vaguely Alan Wake-style psychological thriller (though it's supposedly not supernatural in the slightest?). The rest of December's still a little too up in the air right now, but hopefully we'll get some more announcements soon that I can use to pad out a list to Santa.
Nothing else is really jumping out at me right now, though there's a few supposed 2020 games that haven't nailed down release dates yet - I'm really curious to see if we get Axiom Verge 2, Bugsnax, or The Pathless this year. In terms of Giant Bomb content fodder, Kerbal Space Program 2's supposed to be a 2020 release too, but I'll believe it when I see Vinny try to launch a bunch of terrified potato people into space while strapped to a poorly constructed nuke.
Let me know what you're hoping to play in the coming three months, that is if your eyes haven't glazed over from this massive wall of text. Sorry about that! I have a lot of stuff to say, turns out!
Next Time: What I Played in my Autumn Quarantine, followed by What I Played in my 2021 Quarantine.
Starting Four Sided Fantasy, it immediately hit me with a wave of nostalgia with its puzzle-platformer gameplay and slightly wistful and melancholy dialogue-free story; it felt like stepping back into 2010 when games of this type (both structurally and narratively) were the primary output of the Indie sphere, following the likes of Braid, Fez, and Limbo. I don't mean for this to sound like I'm denigrating Four Sided Fantasy for being behind the curve, though I'm sure I've seen all its tricks before. It's more that games like Four Sided Fantasy have mostly vanished and endless roguelikes (the hottest trend if 2020 hits like Spelunky 2, Hades, and Rogue Legacy 2 are any indication), survival sims, and even my beloved explormers have all but supplanted them. Felt kinda nice to step back a decade, when the world wasn't quite as on fire as it is now.
Four Sided Fantasy's primary feature, or gimmick if you'd like, is the player's ability to "pause" the side-scrolling platformer which causes the screen's edges to become portals to their opposite sides. Like if you stopped the camera in Super Mario Bros. and Mario kept on walking off the right edge of the screen, only to reappear on the left. Naturally, the obstacles the game throws at you are designed to be overcome with this feature: a sudden wall stops your progress, until you pause the scrolling, turn back, and end up on the opposite side of the screen behind the wall, at which point you can then unpause and resume your trek eastwards. As the game passes through the seasons, more tricks are introduced: eventually your second character (the two alternate with every warp) starts walking across the ceiling instead, and later still they'll appear in a background layer in a fashion similar to Mutant Mudds or the more recent Donkey Kong Country Returns games. The game implicitly suggests that the two characters, a man and a woman, are lovers who are kept apart by circumstances beyond their control, symbolically represented in-game as their inability to manifest in the same place at the same time. Beyond that, you're left to piece together most of what's happening yourself, from the scratchy VCR effects to how you seem to be cycling through a whole year's worth of seasons.
Dropping down here is certain death. Unless, of course, you hit the scroll pause and drop safely onto the top path. If that puzzle sounds too easy, it might be worth mentioning that this floating platform I'm on wasn't originally here...
What I appreciated about Four Sided Fantasy, and I'm not certain this won't read like a subtle knock against it, is the way I was able to breeze through the game. The puzzles can demand a certain amount of precision at times (though certainly not to the extent of a masocore like Celeste or Super Meat Boy) but there's a point about ten to twenty minutes in after facing enough of these distinct screen-wrapping puzzles that you get a feel for what the game wants and the "off screen" direction it wants you to take, whether it's left, right, down, or up. Once that point has passed, you find yourself gliding through the puzzles and feeling like a genius while doing so, which I think speaks more to the game's intuitive approach and how the player is able to quickly internalize new rules on the fly. You could also say that the game's too easy and shies away from genuine brainteasers either because of the limitations of this central feature or a desire not to tax the player too much given the game's gentle, casual tone. It might also just be I became a super genius overnight without realizing, though given I almost forgot to take the trash out today despite being reminded twice I'm quite sure that isn't the case. Either way, the game hit the right wavelength for me and though it made the game a bit shorter - and it was already short, with a HowLongToBeat estimate somewhere around two hours - that smooth as butter progression made for a relaxing way to spend the afternoon. I might suggest that the platforming was a bit too momentum-heavy for my liking at times, but that may well have been lag introduced by a weaker laptop PC struggling with the game's bloomy visual effects.
I occasionally like to revisit the puzzle-platformer genre to appreciate the roots of the Indie movement, even if it's moved onto other things by now, and while Four Sided Fantasy perhaps isn't anything too new it's not something that carries a lot of negatives either. I appreciate that it still had tricks to show off even towards the game's conclusion, including the visual mindscrew that caps the game, and a little touch of ambiguity to its message and narrative. Inventive, off-beat, yet brief and ephemeral; it is the type of experience that the Indie market has always been adept at producing.
You can just about see the character in this picturesque screenshot. Trust me. It's for the best you don't have to do any platforming in this area.
The Tenth Line is, I suspect, what happens when board game nerds are given the reins of a JRPG. If you haven't been playing board games for a while, or perhaps only the occasional Monopoly or Scrabble when family is over, they've embraced their largely grown-up proponents and have become vastly more complex and feature-rich over the years, demanding ever more mastery over Byzantine rulesets and dozens of figurines, dice, cards, board pieces, and other paraphernalia. "Advanced" board gaming has ceased to be the domain of a few weird grognards hanging around Games Workshop looking to bolster their Eldar factions, and have paradoxically become more accessible to a wider audience of discerning teens and adults despite their increased level of intricacy. The Tenth Line has, deep down, a framework familiar to anyone acquainted with RPGs, but one with obtuse systems layered over obtuse systems that I'm sure I'll still be trying to make heads or tails of as I draw closer to its conclusion.
The Tenth Line features three primary characters: an unnamed human princess on the run from cultists, and a pair of beastmen brothers (adoptive) who decide to help her get back home for the royal reward waiting for them. Surrounding this are a series of prophecies - which also happen to be the dogma of this world - that recently seem to be coming true one after the other, the last (the titular Tenth Line) being a vaguely apocalyptic premonition. This party of three seems fairly set in stone from the outset: each character has dedicated pages for their stat growth and their skill management, and occupies a specific role in combat that complements the other two. Guest characters meanwhile can be assigned to provide the occasional bonus attack from the wings. The game balances the majority of its runtime between its combats, which use a sort of Valkyrie Profile (or Indivisible, as a more recent example) system where the three characters can attack in any order within a certain active time window, the idea being to use their attacks in the combinations that make the most sense for maximum damage output. These combat sessions divide the screen into three horizontal "lanes": enemies pour across each three until they occupy the front column of their side of the screen, and player attacks can affect one line, one column, or one enemy (usually for concentrated damage, best suited for tougher foes). The other half of the game involves 2D platforming, where the player ascends or descends floors to initiate encounters with visible enemies (which can be ambushed, but can ambush you in turn) and collect treasures. The platforming also has some mild puzzle elements, with each character providing a different active skill: the Princess pushes blocks, the kobold Rik can toss stones to knock items out of high places, and the dragon Tox can remove obstacles with his elemental breath.
This game is definitely *a lot* at first. However, after a few hours I now know what all of this means. Mostly.
However, in terms of where the player's time is going, a sizeable chunk of it will be spent in the various character progression menus. There are so many systems in play here, from the License Grid-style stat-boosting table, to the individual weapon upgrading systems, to equipping your characters with consumables to use in a pinch when fighting: each of these systems are powered by items the player finds while playing, and each item has a mixture of properties that makes them better suited for certain roles. For instance, a heavy object (like a rock) is good for increasing Tox's breath damage while a sharpened one (like a tooth) is better for Rik or the Princess, since they both used edged weapons. Each item also has an elemental type and a certain "path" shape: the "License Grid" works a bit like Pipe Dream, so items might be L-shapes or T-shapes or I-shapes and it's up to the player to use the correct ones to navigate a path through each character's grid. Any new item, no matter how unimpressive it sounds, could have a valuable purpose hidden somewhere deep in the morass of menus and systems that comprise the game's progression systems. It's almost intimidating the way it's all presented to you early on, though thankfully with only three characters to ever worry about it's never overwhelming nor is it really possible to gimp a character or waste a valuable item.
I appreciate the game's convoluted moxie more than I perhaps enjoy playing it, though it's a close-run contest. The platforming is easily the game's worst aspect, as the jumps are swimmy, it's easy to get trapped by an enemy who suddenly darts towards you without warning (leading to an enemy ambush), and you have to drag all three characters with you through each of these platforming sections by alternating between them - leaving someone too far behind means it takes a combat turn for them to catch up to you after triggering an encounter. That said, it is a game that is rewarding for completionists, as you get tremendous rewards for collecting every item and opening every chest in the environment, often a vitally important new upgrade to your weapon classes. Combat can be a slog at times - you might fight anywhere between four and forty enemies, though the many AoE attacks at your disposal blasts through hordes quickly enough (it's a little like the older Might and Magic games in that regard) - but the balance of real-time combo juggling and the strategic choices for each character's attack that turn and how they might synergize keeps the fighting engaging enough. There's also a card game, Quad Pro Quo, which works much like Final Fantasy VIII's Triple Triad, complete with high-value cards bearing the faces of playable characters and major NPCs: there's no risk of losing cards, only your meager buy-in, and each opponent in the game has just the one item to win (often a new card) before you're good to move on. It's not an incredibly elaborate card game, but as an optional value-add it's a welcome break from the core gameplay.
Ah, this takes me back. There's no "Shuffle or Boogie" though, sadly.
It's the nature of complex games to grow on you over time, as your initial confusion and intimidation makes way for a deeper admiration for the level of nuance and the amount of plate-spinning in play, and I'm just about there with The Tenth Line as I enter its third chapter. It's written well enough - one neat narrative-based quirk is that every NPC conversation is different depending on your currently active character, as are each of the trio's responses when checking enemies and their stats - and a clean visual style that balances pixellated sprites with more detailed portraits. The menus and UI is replete with little details everywhere you look, almost all of which have some bearing on the game and your characters' respective combat-readiness, so I've been trying to take as much of it in as possible so I don't miss any avenues of improving my characters further. The game's difficulty slider is an odd thing: it doesn't so much make the combat easier than mitigates the game's complexity, removing certain features from the game to simplify matters (the easiest setting, which is functionally the "story-only mode," eliminates the combat altogether). A chief purpose of a difficulty slider is to make a game more accessible, of course, but I'm not yet sold on the idea that cutting out huge swathes of the experience of playing it is the most conducive path. I suppose I am coming at this from the perspective of a turn-based JRPG nerd though, so I'll acquiesce on this.
The Tenth Line is proving to be a game that is richly rewarding in how gradually you come to understand it, even if it falters with some of its core gameplay aspects - neither the platforming or the RPG combat are wholly excellent on their own, though having a mixture of both means that neither have to wear out their welcome. Like many of the great JRPGs that have influenced it, The Tenth Line is something you're expected to sink your teeth into as you spend upwards of 20 to 30 hours tinkering around with its features, while enjoying a story that includes serious themes like xenophobia and faith without ever becoming too heavy or joyless. Its absurdly deep inclinations certainly won't be for everyone, but I've decided to stick it out for now.
In the many decades I've been kicking around this increasingly imperiled blue orb of ours, I've played through more than my fair share of role-playing games from Japan, or those rare games made in the west inspired by same. The boundaries between what counts as eastern and western in RPG design have become all the more obscured over time, but back in the early '90s when I was getting my foot in the door with the likes of colorful, earnest escapism like Secret of Mana and Illusion of Gaia there was such a stark contrast between what they were doing and the bespoke D&D parties and narrative-free dungeoneering of their western peers that I'd been playing on my Atari ST.
The core essence of a good JRPG is something I want to discuss today, as I look into the many ways "throwbacks" - either those created by aspirant Indie studios, or the original development studios after feeling a bit nostalgic - have tried to both homage and revolutionize that JRPG golden era of the '90s, broadly speaking.
Do focus equally on the two most vital genre qualities: narrative and mechanics
It's important to establish character strengths over the course of a game's narrative. For instance, Estelle has a very large stick.
Any JRPG is going to spend a lot of its runtime on its narrative, whether that's developing character arcs, establishing new settings and the related ecologies/economies, or a procession of exposition-laden cutscenes between dungeons and boss fights. As that's all a given in any JRPG excepting perhaps the Souls games, it stands to reason that you want it to be well-written, and the characters relatable and likeable in their own idiosyncratic ways without coming off as empty archetypes. Likewise, JRPG gamplay is frequently known not only for its mechanical complexity, but also its distinctiveness: Japan isn't as beholden to AD&D as a lot of western RPGs are, which tend to use variations of that ruleset (or peers like GURPS) as either their bedrock or as a launching point, and thus so many JRPGs tend to carve out their own path unfettered by expectations and precursors (excepting those from the same series, since some amount of consistency is warranted).
Even if it's only a "throwback" because Falcom tends to be a little behind the curve when it comes to dropping huge production budgets into their games, Trails in the Sky is the gold standard when it comes to "old-school" JRPGs widely available today. The Trails series is renowned for their quality scripts and localizations, and by the time you hit the Second Chapter the mechanical complexity of the combat has found its niche and will really throw some fastballs at you once it's reasonably assured you can handle them. The Bracer Guild mission structure and Orbment Grid customization are tricky to master too, but rewarding once you've figured them out. Trails strikes the perfect balance between those two integral components, and it's why such an ancient looking game series can command the high level of respect that it has. (I wrote more about Trails and the Legend of Heroes franchise it hails from over yonder, if you'd like a spoiler-free primer.)
Don't be too slavish about the conventions of old
No complaints about Lost Sphear's production values, but the whole affair feels a little toothless.
There's a temptation when working on a 16-bit JRPG to be as faithful as possible to the old guard; after all, as the common wisdom goes, if you're trying to sell your game to those who grew up with this console generation of yesteryear you want it to be as era-accurate as possible, right? But in ignoring the decades of gradual game design improvements to the genre, or at least those that might still feasibly apply to an older blueprint, you're left with a game that just feels out of time. Quality of life improvements and a consideration for the player's free-time can modernize a JRPG experience in a wholly positive way without compromising its retro appeal via more overt characteristics like the aforementioned narrative and gameplay. Even a throwback that uses never-before-seen features and ideas can feel hopelessly antiquated if it drags because of overzealous random encounter frequency or a lack of modern features.
Square Enix, from what I've been able to tell mostly from contemporary reviews rather than first-hand experience, falls afoul of this misconception with those games produced by their well-intentioned subsidiary Tokyo RPG Factory, after being inspired to return to their 16/32-bit roots after noting the success of Bravely Default by Silicon Studio (which I recently learned also made the excellent nostalgia piece 3D Dot Game Heroes). I've been playing a bit of Lost Sphear this week, the second of (so far) three TRPGF games, and while there's a lot to appreciate the game it still feels a bit antiquated in certain regards and lethargic with its pacing. For instance, it makes the appreciated step of eliminating random encounters, which also means moving around the world map never triggers a fight: however, this also leads to stretches where you're wandering around the world talking to NPCs to move the story along where you don't fight anything for like an hour. The game also uses a more hurried version of the active time battle gauge, a system responsible for a lot of Square's successes in the '90s starting with Final Fantasy IV, which makes it hard to properly strategize once your characters gain more abilities to use and bosses require a more fine-tuned strategy (exploiting elemental weaknesses, alternating physical and magical attacks, etc.) to defeat. I like Lost Sphear's setting and story - the idea of a world facing a metaphysical crisis as areas and people suddenly blink out of existence is kinda chilling - but playing it has been a largely ambivalent affair. I can't help but wonder how much of that is because it feels a little too deliberately creaky and hoary than other recent throwbacks I've played.
Do use a hand-drawn art style if possible
I could happily slap around slimes all day if doing so looked this good.
One commodity of the modern age is that you don't have to be beholden to the limitations of older hardware. Even if you're making a 2D side-scroller or something with a fixed overhead camera perspective, it doesn't mean characters and environments can't be rendered in 3D or use high-definition vector graphics. One of the most attractive games of the past five years was the Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap remake, which was an almost exact duplicate of an 8-bit platformer for the Master System: the chief difference being the new graphical facelift, which switched the stumpy pixel sprites for smoothly animated, hand-drawn creations.
An example of a very by-the-numbers 16-bit JRPG ersatz with highly detailed character graphics and animations was the Battle Chasers: Nightwar adaptation, based on a long-running comic book series. It was important to the developers to get the tone and the visuals of the original source medium right, and so the game looks fantastic even if it's still structurally a familiar turn-based RPG where the heroes stand on one side and the enemy on the other swapping blows and magic.
But also...
Don't feel bad about using pixel art if it's fancy enough
Ara Fell suggests there might be such a thing as *too* much art.
There are many reasons to retain the pixel look: authenticity, it's the artist's preferred style, and that they're comparatively cheaper to make (I'd assume, given the art tools required for the alternatives). Even with a certain pixel count limit, modern games with that art direction are still free from the strict limits imposed by the resolutions and simultaneous sprite counts that older systems were saddled with. I think it is a little harder to stand out if you decide to use pixel graphics, just because they're so prevalent, but with a talented and dedicated enough art team you can still pull off miracles with the format.
I actually have two examples here: one that goes all out with its pixel graphics to an almost absurd degree, and another that takes them in a direction I'd never seen before. The former is Ara Fell, an RPG Maker-developed game that fills each of its scenes with so much incidental detail that it's almost overwhelming: it makes each of its areas so much more visually arresting to explore, as you pick out the treasures and materials in the background you can actually collect and use. The latter is Octopath Traveler, which uses a dimension of depth to make its flat but otherwise intricate pixel characters stand out all the more.
Do remember that strategy JRPGs are also valid
Fell Seal's about as close to the original Final Fantasy Tactics as you can get, and that includes the Advance games.
SRPGs have been quietly building acclaim in the background for as long as they've been around, rarely grabbing the spotlight the way a flashy new Final Fantasy might but still nurturing a fanbase more inclined to moving around grids and playing rock-scissor-paper with troop types. New Fire Emblem entries typically get the most attention, but Nippon Ichi Software has carved out its own niche with their Disgaea series and Indies have started trying their own spins on the more story-focused PS1 SRPGs like Arc the Lad, Vandal Hearts, and, of course, Final Fantasy Tactics. It's an avenue to explore if a more leisurely-paced, tactically-focused approach is for you.
Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark is the most flagrant attempt at an Indie Final Fantasy Tactics (or Tactics Ogre, if you want to go further back in the genealogy) I've encountered, and mostly nails the deeply complex Job system and its endless number of cross-class customization options. It's a mite more challenging as a result, as you'll frequently face enemies with stronger specializations than your own party if not the same degree of versatility, but if you loved Final Fantasy Tactics and were a little disappointed that late-game enemies didn't take full advantage of all those high-level Jobs and abilities, Fell Seal has you covered. Just don't expect anything quite as elaborate as Yasumi Matsuno's Shakespearean plotting from its story.
Don't be afraid to mix it up with even more genre hybrids
Golf Story's Disc Golf (never Frisbee Golf) weirdos are also entertaining. Very serious about their dumb made-up sport.
Now I'd be the last to suggest that JRPGs aren't a strong enough genre to stand on their own, but I feel like if you're going to go back to the drawing board for some new twist to stand out in this sea of throwbacks you might consider bolting something onto the core progression, or adapting a different genre to be more like an RPG. The PS2 era in particular was fond of hybridizing the JRPG format, with the likes of Dark Cloud and Persona, but there have been shaky experiments as far back as the TurboGrafx's Final Lap Twin and World Court Tennis from 1989. Not only is there untapped potential in the many mergers that have yet to exist, but the juxtaposition of two dissimilar genres can be a great source for comedic writing.
A fine recent example would be Golf Story for Switch, released in 2017 a few months after the system's launch. While largely a 16-bit JRPG in presentation only, the quest structure of the game and its emphasis on a narrative - with every challenge and "battle" revolving around golf in some way - made a compelling case for combining sports, RPG mechanics, and dumb jokes. I might not have enjoyed the way the golf physics felt in that game, but I loved exploring it and living in that world of golf-obsessed weirdos and the little arcs that would foment, like the rivalry between the protagonist and an overly aggressive teenager. Hearing that the same devs are working on a broader "Sports Story" makes me excited to see what they come up with.
Do remember to copy from the best
Citizens of Earth even shares EarthBound's distaste for hippies.
A problem I've encountered with many JRPG throwbacks is that they don't really aim to emulate any game series in particular. Granted, this helps them stay on the right side of the defendant's bench, but on the other hand it leads to these games feeling a bit indistinct in their creative direction. Like you're painting a whole genre with broad strokes and creating an indistinctly familiar amalgamation rather than putting your own spin on an older oddity that maybe didn't get the time in the sun (and contemporary imitators) that it deserved. That's certainly the case with games like EarthBound, which didn't inspire as many clones as the more traditional RPGs of its era, but has since seen its fair share of homages from a score of Indie developers who found its optimistic, surreal charm highly formative.
Citizens of Earth (and presumably its sequel Citizens of Space, though I've yet to play it) made the conscious decision to base its world in a vaguely '50s version of small-town America replete with little green men and other sci-fi silliness in the mold of an EarthBound, but also incorporated a Suikoden structure where you could keep expanding your party of followers to a ridiculous extent, often jumping through hoops to ingratiate the final few dissenters. I'd also be remiss if I didn't also mention Undertale, as creator Toby Fox would be the first to tell you of the many eccentric influences that went into his Indie darling (not least of which was Moon: Remix RPG Adventure, freshly remastered for Switch). Happy fifth anniversary, Undertale!
Don't bite off more than you can chew
I definitely wanted to like Shiness more. Really aren't enough Tales-likes in the world.
A primary reason Indie developers stick to making games of yesteryear than something that could compete with the modern AAA industry is a matter of resources and man(person?)power. When an Indie developer does try to shoot for the moon with a lavish 3D RPG with all sorts of systems upon systems, they can sometimes end up with an underbaked mess on their hands. The sheer amount of time and money that emulating something as prolific as Final Fantasy XV, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, or Tales of Berseria, could open you up to any number of delays, technical issues, and hurried segments (even Final Fantasy XV itself barely made it out of development hell). It's fine to be ambitious, since that's how the industry grows and opens up new avenues, but it's important not to overreach and let your vision vastly outdistance the reality of what you can create.
I can't say with any authority that the above happened to Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom, but while its aspirations and influences were clear it felt like it fell far from the mark it was trying to hit. A 3D RPG with an emphasis on exploration and an elaborate, fighter-style combat system that was a little bit Tales and a little bit Avatar: The Last Airbender, Shiness clearly had ideas to spare but not the execution to make it all happen to a satisfactory degree. Sadly, the studio that made it - Enigami - folded shortly after the game's release. I'd need a Noclip style documentary to know for sure what happened, but it strikes me as all too familiar.
Do consider a compact, more considered runtime
Cosmic Star Heroine starts with a fight against drones while abseiling down a skyscraper, and then gets wilder from there.
A serendipitous quirk of Indie development is that they can't make their games too long unnecessarily because that would involve spending more time designing and testing the game than their budget might allow. In the past, developers might be tempted to pad out their RPGs with busywork and grinding - the "double-spaced lines in an essay due tomorrow" of RPG design - but modern designers, perhaps having lived through one too many games that did just that, have chosen instead to simply make their games more truncated for the sake of brevity and tighter pacing.
The kings (and queens) of this approach to JRPG design are the fine folks at Zeboyd Games, who rarely produce RPGs that exceed twenty hour runtimes and yet all still feel full-bodied with lengthy progression arcs to characters and their skillsets and an always appropriate level of challenge to the combat. Part of how they pull this off is that they carefully consider each individual encounter, rather than letting you fight the same half-dozen assortments of randomly encountered foes in any given dungeon. Each conflict almost always ends with your characters gaining new skills, changing the dynamic of the battles to follow, and features foes that, while you may have encountered them individually before, it's rare you'll meet them in the same quantity and configuration twice. Cosmic Star Heroine is the most recent game of theirs I've played, and it's as well-paced as any RPG released on the SNES or Genesis (and I'll be sure to play their Cthulhu Saves Christmas at some point in the near future).
Don't feel like you have to make a JRPG, even if you have RPG Maker installed
Oh boy, Rakuen. Get the tissues ready for this one.
Probably the most important header, if we're talking about innovation in the Indie space. Despite being specifically designed to generate pixel JRPGs I've discovered a lot of very curious non-RPG applications of RPG Maker over the years, and I can't tell if that's to the credit of the versatility of Enterbrain's long-running consumer creation series or the ingenuity of its end users (I suspect a little of both). A non-RPG made with this software will often use the concomitant nostalgia of its 16-bit JRPG graphics and UI tools to subvert the player's expectations, or otherwise couch an unfamiliar type of game in a familiar set of trappings.
In Japan, these aberrations started with the likes of Yume Nikki, which dropped the RPG elements and became a free-form exploration game about livid dreams and journeys through the psyche. The original Corpse Party also delivered its chills in a combat-free narrative adventure. Western developers have produced To the Moon, its sequels A Bird Story and Finding Paradise, Rakuen, and The Lost Art of Innkeeping (maybe not as famous or as polished as the others, but one I recently enjoyed). They might have puzzles, they might have stealth sequences, but you're never tossed into a random encounter with a group of slimes as far as I can recall. Evidence if evidence was needed that if adventure game developers have a story to tell, they will find an avenue no matter how unlikely through which to deliver it.
After shuffling things around last minute, I found myself dropping my usual random chooser process for this week's pick and just went with Timespinner, as one of the more acclaimed explormers from the past few years that was unfairly languishing in my backlog. Sometimes you don't even need an excuse. Timespinner is very much built from the Castlevania: Symphony of the Night blueprint (right down to annoying rare monster drops you might spend half an hour farming) but given an extra layer of time manipulation and paradox that both enhances the story without getting too up its own labyrinthine ass, and ameliorates the platforming in a way sort of but not quite the same as Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (oddly, sand is a big deal in this game too).
The protagonist is Lunais, the most recent "Time Messenger" in a clan of secretive nomads who protect the secrets of time travel from those that might abuse them, and her destiny is to be wiped from the timeline so that she might one day use her clan's time-travel device (the titular Timespinner) in times of great peril to travel back far enough to personally deliver a message of warning. This process has been an effective alert system for ages, but when Lunais is tasked with saving her clan from their destruction by an invading force of technologically advanced alien beings, the Timespinner is destroyed in the process and she is flung to her enemy's homeworld of Lacheim. The game then spends its time, as it were, between the present day Lacheim, where scientists are busy working on the broken Timespinner to learn its secrets and expand the reach of their galactic empire ever further, and the ancient past of Lacheim, back when they were a penal colony of a different despotic empire and struggling for independence at any cost. It's a dense plot, but one given plenty of chance to breathe with optional story logs and a number of NPCs to talk to and help out.
If going from the medieval pastoral milieu of her homeplanet to seeing the hovercars and high-rises outside the present day Lacheim's windows bothers Lunais at all, it doesn't register.
Lunais fights primarily through two "orbs": these orbs not only manifest in different ways - sometimes as melee weapons, sometimes as elemental magic - but level up independently, giving the player a great deal of customization potential. She also acquires the usual upgrades typical to an explormer - a double-jump, the ability to dive underwater, etc. - and can equip armor and accessories for stat boosts, not unlike Alucard and the vampire killers that followed. While the two equipped orbs don't combine in any interesting ways - Lunais always alternates them - the player can acquire necklaces and rings that are powered by the orbs and grow stronger when they do: the necklaces provide powerful spells that require charging up and spend some of Lunais's "aura" stat (which works like MP, and slowly regenerates), while the rings provide passive boosts that might involve increasing defense, revealing secret walls, giving attacks a life-stealing aspect, and so on. Often, you'll find that an orb isn't great in combat, but its effect as a necklace or ring makes it worth holding onto and powering up regardless. However, the most useful arrow in Lunais's quiver is her ability to temporarily freeze time: this makes enemies immobile but also indestructible, so in combat terms it's best to use it to avoid a wave of enemy projectiles or to move behind an enemy that is guarded from the front. The time freeze is otherwise used to turn enemies into transitory platforms: many of the early "need a double jump" type of impasses can be conquered this way, provided there's a foe around to freeze.
Like another recent well-regarded scion of the IGAvanias, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, Timespinner gives the players so many boons and opportunities for growth that it renders the game a little on the easy side as a result. The Nightmare difficulty, which is the next highest after Normal, can only be unlocked with New Game Plus (or a special code), which is a shame as I might suggest experienced explormer fans start there. On Normal, I powered through almost every boss on my first attempt without ever needing to resort to my enormous stack of curatives, and I can't say I was being particularly careful when it came to memorizing and avoiding attack patterns or even using the time-freeze judiciously to avoid the worst of them. Your mileage may vary, of course, and there's a lot to be said for how running around checking every nook and cranny for upgrade items (there's the usual assortment of HP-Ups, MP-Ups, etc. off the beaten path) and new equipment can greatly unbalance a game's carefully planned difficulty curve, but I nonetheless waltzed through this game; if I slowed down for any reason, it was because I wasn't quite sure where to go next. Not so much a complaint but a warning for those who like their Castlevania types on the challenging side.
Some of the necklace spells are a bit on the overpowered side...
One notable aspect of the game's narrative is the preponderance of LGBTQ+ relationships, to the extent that they're more the norm than the hetero alternative. A game made this century will often toss in a potential same-sex love interest for one of its major or ancillary characters for the ongoing sake of greater inclusion, or at the least a hint that it's what that character is into, but it's much more overtly stated here. There are at least two pairs of characters in loving same-sex relationships (one you help nurture with a sidequest chain), one major trans character, one possible ace (i.e. asexual), and the protagonist is explicitly stated to be bisexual: this has a minor fun gameplay utilization too, as "temptress" enemies such as succubi and sirens have both a male and female version, and it's entirely random which one you might encounter in any given circumstance. This otherwise has no bearing on the game or its story in broader terms, but is a nice little change to the usual dynamics and something those who consider themselves LGBTQ+ and/or would like to see more representation of those relationships in their media might be interested in learning.
I should also remark on Timespinner's presentation. While pixel art is a fairly well-established presence in games of this type, it's still exquisitely done in this game with some otherworldly vistas and provides a nice juxtaposition between the same environments in both the distant past (where it was much more green and lively) and the present day (where the planet of Lacheim has undergone severe environmental collapse in part due to the technological advancements). Some areas are in ruins, some enemies have mutated over the centuries due to the radiation, and some extinct species now only exist as robots: a scientist log explains that the robots built for their Empire's armies were modelled on the planet's extinct species as a sort of subconscious apology for the humans' role in their demise, as part of a greater process of ongoing ecological destruction. It's worth running around for these extra logs and messages, as their context aids both the worldbuilding of this eon-spanning empire as well as the protagonist's personal journey of revenge. The game's music is also uniformly excellent, and I was sometimes glad to return to an area for collectathon purposes to hear one of my favorites playing again.
Since the game's easy enough to not need it in combat, you can sometimes forget that you have time-stopping to fall back on when stuck. The only way to ascend here is to freeze these little Orko dudes and use them as footholds.
Minor caveats aside, I really enjoyed my (uh) time with Timespinner and though it could've done with being larger and more ambitious (hard to do when you have a fixed Kickstarter budget and a lot of expectant pre-paid customers, I'd imagine) and made its harder difficulty available from the outset there's not a whole lot else to kvetch about. It gets everything I like about this genre right, from the almost invisible quality-of-life touches (ample fast-travel points and multiple loadouts to switch between, for two examples) to the "big" concerns like a decent story to follow and combat that flows well and offers many customization paths to personalize your approach. Highly recommended, and I'm happy I took the plunge on it sooner rather than later.
Guessing there won't be a randomizer mode for the new Switch remaster. Missed opportunity if so.
Hey there, I'm still on my randomizer business. The latest one I felt like playing is a Super Mario 64 Randomizer, created by Andre Meyer. I don't know if it's the official one used by speedrunners, but it has all the features anyone could want from a Super Mario 64 jumbled up free-for-all: all the painting entrances, in-level object and enemy placements, where you spawn into the level, and even dialogue boxes and Mario's color palette can be shuffled and redistributed.
This creates a lot of unique problems in addition to making certain tasks easier, depending on where things end up. An example of this would be a Star that requires you to jump through a lot of hoops to reach, which has instead been conveniently relocated to five feet from your starting point (provided the world of Mario has equivalent dimensions to our own, which I'm not entirely certain is true). Collecting the 100 coins necessary for each course's secret coin Star is a bit more of an ask in most cases: coins are scattered haphazardly around the course, not in the natural lines and rings you'd expect. Some are often straight up unreachable. The secret cap zones that unlock caps for wider use have also been dispersed around the castle, so there's no guarantees you'll find one early, and ditto for the Bowser courses which provide much needed keys to open up other areas of the castle (unless you feel like glitching past them, of course).
This particular randomizer hasn't implemented a system where every Star-milestone door has a random target to hit - the doors in the lobby have either one- or three-Star minimum requirements, but could theoretically be much higher - but that's more the concern of the speedrunner. Since I tend to empty a stage of Stars the first time I encounter it, provided they don't need specific caps to do so, I've been racking them up and blowing past most of these required totals without issue.
No big list of screenshots this time, since we're all familiar with the game and there's not a whole lot that's really striking about the new item placements. Instead, I've got a little series of anecdotes about how Bowser's been screwing with me on this latest procedurally-generated adventure.
First, a note on Star distribution:
In the Super Mario 64 randomizer community, there's much hullabaloo about the difference between "free standing" Stars and "fixed" Stars. The former are those Stars that are just hanging out in the level geometry, usually at the top of a structure or the end of platforming challenges: these get their locations shuffled, so they're usually (but not always) in more accessible locations. This also applies to Stars hiding in question mark blocks, since all the blocks got redistricted also. The fixed ones are those you earn from boss fights or by activating something and only appear once the task is complete, so they're always found in their usual locations.
Also, another thing to note is that items only get relocated within their "zone." If there's a transition between one area and the rest of the level, only the items (coins, Stars, etc.) within that zone are reorganized, with no cross-pollination with the outside. An example would be the secret slide in Tall Tall Mountain: that place has all its coins relocated, but since it didn't have any Stars to begin with there aren't any to be found in there.
(NB: It might help to have a moderate-to-high level of familiarity with Super Mario 64, its locales, and their Star goals to follow all this.)
The very first accessible zone - the room which normally leads to Bob-omb Battlefield - instead leads to Bowser in the Fire Sea, the second of the three Bowser boss zones. This stage can have some unpredictable red coin placements if you're going for the secret Star here, as many of the lava "pools" underneath the platforms have a raised border "lip" that red coins can spawn on. From what I can tell, the randomizer isn't supposed to spawn objects over pits or hazardous terrain like lava, but it can occasionally happen regardless: I had one red coin just hovering over lava that I had to damage boost to reach. Honestly, this could've been a lot worse as an opening stage, because even if I couldn't get that red coin Star (and I need at least one Star to unlock two more rooms in the Lobby: the entrance to Whomp's Fortress and the Peach's Secret Slide levels) the key I'd earn from Bowser gets me onto the next floor, where all the painting portals are out in the open.
Though I have many options, I decide to stick to the ground floor for now. The Whomp's Fortress entrance leads to Dire Dire Docks, which is hardly my favorite level but not a particularly difficult one. A few of the Stars are easier to reach, since they don't require leaping between those poles in one of this area's more awkward challenges, but I did run into a few problems. The first is that a few of the coins are either missing or stuck in inaccessible areas: there's a huge gap in the wall where Bowser's sub was that sucks you in if you get close, so anything in that region can be a hazard to swim towards. As such, I've abandoned ever getting the 100 coins Star here, since the total coins on the level is something exceptionally tight, like 104. The other issue is the jetstream Star, where you have to pass through the rings: you can't get the Star without the Metal Cap, since the jetstream pushes you away, so that's out for now. Otherwise, it's five new Stars to add to my first, and that unlocks most of the rest of the ground floor (excepting the Bowser door, which requires eight).
This Randomizer hack (or rather, the guy who made it, who isn't a hack) found some custom portrait art for the levels that, in the core game, didn't have portraits. Dire Dire Docks, pictured here, just had a wobbly blue Stargate portal for instance.
The Princess's Secret Slide warp instead takes me to Tick Tock Clock, which presents an interesting problem for randomizer devs to figure out: what to do with levels like Tick Tock Clock or Wet-Dry World where how you enter the portrait affects the world? Well, it seems they picked a default setting (it's fortunate that Tick Tock Clock was stuck on "3 o'clock," its slowest setting, since the others can create issues) for both. Tick Tock Clock was irksome because all the free standing Stars were relocated to close to the top of this vertical level, so I had to hop over all the same shifting blocks and conveyor belts several times to net them all. The last of the eight red coins - which in the core game can all be found around the same early part of the level - was right at the top too, where the Thwomp would normally be. I think in any competitive speedrun scenario, they would've skipped this version of Tick Tock Clock immediately.
The Cool, Cool Mountain door (the first of the two 3-Star doors) led to Tiny-Huge Island, which I was in no mood to take on. It's easily my least liked world, given how perilous certain parts of it are, though I'm at least glad it starts you off in the "Tiny" island variant since it's easier to move around in.
The Jolly Roger Bay door normally leads to two new levels: Jolly Roger Bay itself and the Secret Aquarium entrance. In the scrambled version, these portals now lead to Shifting Sand Land and Snowman's Land, respectively. I don't particularly like Shifting Sand Land due to the amount of instant-death quicksand traps, but on the whole the new randomized version doesn't make things that much harder to deal with, though I'm hesitant to start the four pillars Star (the one that leads to the boss fight) without the Wing Cap. Meanwhile, Snowman's Land immediately presents a problem which is then rendered moot. If you recall, there's a part in Snowman's Land where you have to sneak past the snowman's ice breath, which buffets you back down to the starting area sans your hat. To get past, you need to hide behind a nearby giant penguin: the giant penguin, however, has been relocated to somewhere near the Ice Bully's arena. Fortunately, there's nothing on the snowman's head you need to reach: the Star up there has been moved somewhere closer to the ground. In fact, the most awkward thing to deal with in the scrambled version of Snowman's Land is that aforementioned Ice Bully, who's been moved all the way over to where the green shell spawns behind the lake area: to get his Star, you have to keep kicking him gradually over to his arena, where he can be dunked into the water as per usual.
My favorite glitch involved this wooden post in Bob-omb Battlefield. It's right in the path of these rolling cannonballs, so they all just kinda get... stuck.
The Bowser door lead to Princess's Secret Slide, which has two Stars up for grabs: the first is earned by reaching the end and hitting the question mark block down there, while the other spawns if you cross the finish line under a specific time. The second spawns at the end as usual, but the question mark block has been relocated to further up the slide, which means carefully hitting it on the way down and then sort of jump-hopping back up to it.
At this point, the warp to the Wing Cap zone - found by standing on the sun pattern in the lobby and staring up into the light - was open, but instead lead to the Vanish Cap zone. The Vanish Cap zone is one of the hardest to get all the red coins on, because it starts you off on a long slide full of platforms that is difficult to scale back up. I was fortunate that all the red coins spawned at the bottom area, but then the Star itself spawned halfway up the slide. There's a technique to climb back up slides, but it's fairly precise and awkward to pull off. I think the Princess's Secret Slide and this area are the only two places where I'll need to use it, thankfully.
While I cannot access the basement, since the first Bowser zone has yet to reveal itself, I can at least pop over to where the Boos hang out and see what's been changed there. The Boo Carousel warp instead leads to Tall, Tall Mountain, which means I've accessed almost the entire back-half of the game in these first few rooms. Tall, Tall Mountain's slide level was a nightmare to get the requisite number of coins on (I usually go for around 40 at least) for the 100 coin Star for the level, but beyond that most of the course has free-standing Stars, and they were all now within easy reach (an exception was the "Blast to the Lonely Mushroom" Star, which spawned in pretty much the usual place). You also need to climb the mountain to the very top at least once for the "Mystery of the Monkey Cage" Star, which doesn't get randomized. The red coins took a while to find too; I'm just glad none of them spawned in the slide area.
Koopa the Quick takes his latest loss pretty badly. On the plus side, Mario now has a beautiful tortoiseshell comb for his moustache.
Heading to the first floor, the Wet-Dry World painting led to the secret "Wing Mario Over the Rainbow" area, which was of course impossible without the Wing Cap. The Tall, Tall Mountain portrait instead led to the true Wet-Dry World, which always started me off at the same level of water (about twenty feet deep). It's not that hard to navigate Wet-Dry World, even with all those launcher enemies relocated: there's enough water-level shifting diamonds to get you to your desired depth. I only had to pop over to the underwater town area once for the red coins (they don't leave that area), since everything else was in the main area. One issue: this randomizer doesn't relocate the "secrets" of the various "Find Five Secrets" Stars, so I had to recall where they all were. Some are behind big obvious blocks you need to push, which were still in their usual spots, but others required hitting question mark blocks: the blocks themselves had moved, but the secrets were still in their original locations. Just meant feeling around the empty air a bit, is all.
The door to Tiny-Huge Island instead led to, finally, Bob-omb Battlefield, the first level. I also found my first "Star Toad" here as well: the Toads were redistributed around, but I believe still inhabit the floors you find them in. The game has three Toads that give you Stars: one on the first floor, one on the top floor, and one in the basement. The two portraits in the Tiny-Huge Island room both led to Bob-omb Battlefield, and to the same spawn point: right in front of where the Chain Chomp once was, which instead was where King Bob-omb appeared. I was happy that I didn't have to climb all the way up the mountain to fight him, but then after defeating him the Star spawned up there anyway. Otherwise, plain sailing after the harder fare I've been dealing with, though the last Star will have to wait until after I find the Wing Cap (which is proving elusive...).
The Snowman's Land portrait - the one in the mirror room - leads to Cool, Cool Mountain, which has some thematic consistency at least. I think the randomizer was a little too kind to me here: I spawned right next to the Mama Penguin, her baby a scant few yards away, along with five of the red coins I needed and the "Wall Kicks Will Work" Star. Felt a little cluttered around there, to be honest. The other three red coins were thankfully not over by the wall kick area, and there was nothing weird about the slide either (besides that half the coins were now deathtraps).
It's like diving for oysters (it's hard to see, but there's another half-submerged Star at the back).
Since I have the Stars for it now, I hit the top floor for three more courses. Tick Tock Clock's old portal leads to Bowser in the Dark World, the first Bowser boss zone, so now I have the basement levels accessible to me. The Rainbow Ride portal takes me instead to the Secret Aquarium, for another easy bonus Star. The Wing Over the Rainbow bonus area takes me to Hazy Maze Cave, which seems to be the only full level up here. I figured I'd be all turned around in Hazy Maze Cave, since it isn't the easiest place to navigate even in the core game, but the randomizer decided to stick almost all the Stars in Dorrie's area; four of the free standing Stars are just lying at the bottom of his lake like collected sediment. One notable thing about Hazy Maze Cave for randomizers is that it has a level within a level: the Metal Cap zone is here, and has the potential to be a whole world which is annoying to reach because it means passing through Hazy Maze Cave each time. I was lucky, in that it was the Wing Cap zone instead: while I wasn't going to entertain the notion of trying to get all the randomly placed floating red coins here, I was grateful to have unlocked the cap for other locations.
Running around to grab some of the Wing Cap Stars I'd left behind, I ran into trouble with Shifting Sands Land: entering the pyramid via the top (after climbing all four pillars) still spawns you in a random spot inside, so you have to carefully jump backwards off the chequered platform in the middle of the area and then into the gap to reach the boss. Bob-omb Battlefield was way more straightforward, though considering the Pink Bob-omb was on the island that needed a cannon to easily reach, it took some time to get up there.
Time to head to the basement, then. First I gotta drain the moat (not a euphemism) to find... the Metal Cap zone! I guess this randomizer hack just switches the three Cap zones around (either that or it was some weird coincidence).
Down in the basement, Big Boo's Haunt has replaced Lethal Lava Land, which has moved about ten yards away and is now where Shifting Sand Land was. The Hazy Maze Cave pool brings us to Jolly Roger Bay instead, which could've been worse. That left the blue portal to Dire Dire Docks and the hole to Bowser in the Fire Sea to be the entrances to the final two major levels: Rainbow Ride and Whomp's Fortress.
Big Boo's Haunt was easily the weirdest: almost everything had been moved outside, including seven of the red coins (the last was in the attic, annoyingly), the haunted piano, the possessed books, the Star that's usually behind the bookcase puzzle, and the Big Eye. You'd think that would make the Big Eye Star easier, except it still spawns in that little enclosed room and there's no way to hold onto the Vanish Cap long enough to reach it (both Vanish Cap blocks are outside also). The Big Boo that hangs around on top of the mansion was now just outside the carousel area, next to a big pool which made it harder to fight him but easier to regenerate HP after getting hit.
After grabbing a few Big Boo's Haunt Stars, I noticed it'd been a few hours and I found I had the requisite 80 Stars for the end-game, so I just went ahead and finished it. (The last Bowser level, incidentally, is always behind the 80 Stars infinite staircase: completing it immediately finishes the game, so it doesn't get redistributed along with everything else.) There wasn't any point hanging around for the full 120 Stars since a few were clearly impossible to get.
Randomizing all the skyboxes made this final boss a little more cheerful. Look, pyramids!
Outro
I don't believe I'll be taking up Super Mario 64 Randomizer speedrunning any time soon but, like the best randomizers, it did throw into question my mastery of the game and forced me to think on my feet for some of the more elusive Star and coin placements. I think the game's probably a little too open to cause the kind of suspenseful bottlenecks that a Zelda or Metroid randomizer might generate - a lot hinges on having the right item at the right place in those franchises - but it did take a while to open up the basement and that meant settling for a lot of stages I would've been happy to skip in a casual playthrough (Tall Tall Mountain, Tick Tock Clock, Shifting Sand Land...). I also didn't adopt the proper speedrunner strategy, which is to poke your head into a level just long enough to take account of all the easily attainable free standing Stars and leave the more troublesome ones in the dust.
Ultimately, I still don't have the mindset for speedrunning - Super Mario 64 and A Link to the Past are two games I could happily play dozens of times each, but never in a row without at least a few months in-between as a buffer - but I'm still into trying out every randomizer the ROM hacking community decides to make, especially if they have rules that almost completely changes the way I approached the original game. My next port of call is the Dark Souls Remastered item randomizer: I just need to get my hands on a PC that can run it without issue. You'd think that would be a low bar to pass, but...
I have a tendency to stay away from "decision games"; those where you have to constantly make tough choices with consequences that only become apparent later, once you've become powerless to prevent them. Telltale's focus on binary decision matrices, beginning with The Walking Dead: Season 1, is perhaps the most famous example of this format, but there have been many others in the Indie scene including Papers, Please, Gods Will Be Watching, Cart Life, 60 Seconds! and Reigns. Each tends to present an endless parade of Trolley Problems for which there are no simple and easy moral victories, and supporting one viewpoint or character invariably means abandoning another, equally valid option.
I get tremendous anxiety from playing games like this, for two reasons: the first is that it preys on my real-life indecisiveness - while I'm not as comically bad as, say, The Good Place's Chidi Anagonye when it comes to hard (or less than hard) choices, I still tend to freeze up and vacillate for a while when presented with any kind of Morton's fork. The second is that I'm always looking for that ideal route in any video game: a sort of narrative min-maxing that rarely applies to reality but is one of the finer aspects of escapist media - that conceit that a perfect plan always exists and can be executed upon with enough foresight and consideration.
Headliner: NoviNews, the second game in the Headliner series from Unbound Creations, is distinct for a few reasons, the first of which is that your job in determining what becomes headline news (hence the title) has very apparent effects on public opinion and the world around you, but secondly because it's a relatively short game - there's fourteen in-game days, which takes a couple of hours to see in full - designed for replays. Rather than "be satisfied" with your initial set of choices, you can jump right back in and see what would've happened if you'd been more critical of one recurring news topic or another; though you're likely to see people suffer elsewhere.
Later days enforce a minimum or maximum number of news stories you can print. You can also choose not to print a story at all on certain topics, and there are repercussions for that too.
The game is split between two halves, the first of which is the morning shift where you do your job and select op-ed news stories to go out to broadcast later that same day, many of which run counter to each other, which boost or discredit various important news topics. Set in the near future in the fictional country of Novistan, these topics range from the quotidian like government overreach, the necessity or delay-incurring perils of universal healthcare (eep), the nature of the current pandemic wracking the country (eep eep), increased police brutality and extrajudicial abductions (eep eep eep), and the country's strained relationship with its closest neighbors, to the more futuristic like the abundance of peacekeeper drones on the streets, the emergence of the dubious "synthehol" BuzzBetter, or the increased prevalence of genetically modified embryos. Your boss recommends that you stick to whatever positions you initially take, mostly so it doesn't mess around with the game's way of shaping the world to your decisions (besides, dithering on everything just makes the station seem untrustworthy), and the results of these stances and biases have a profound effect on the second half of each day, as you make the evening walk commute back to your apartment.
Graffiti and civil unrest on the streets are the most overt reactions to your news editing, though your close relationships are profoundly affected as well: your brother, Justin, an aspiring comedian with an inclination towards chemical dependency and anxiety attacks who is looking to you for support; your coworker Evie, a foreigner keenly aware of xenophobia (potentially increased or decreased by any nationalist streaks in the news) who came to this country for the better healthcare and is a potential love interest; the local shopkeep Rudy, whose business suffers from increased globalization and might be convinced to sell out and go all-in on the newest synth fads; or an adorable pup that can be kept in your apartment at a minor expense or turned away.
THEY LET ME SIGN CHECKS WITH A STAMP, MARGE. A STAMP!
Headliner: NoviNews isn't quite as severe with its repercussions as a Papers, Please or Gods Will Be Watching, which really seem to enjoy twisting the knife, but seeing how your choices greatly affect the people around you in positive and negative ways is distressing on one level and impactful on another. The former, of course, comes from any sense of guilt you might have in generating suffering for the sake of alleviating it elsewhere, though you can play your character as a generally insouciant career gal (or guy; or non-binary, which isn't an option I see too often) who shrugs their shoulders at the chaos they're inadvertently sowing. There's also the stark similarities between the game and real-life, in part because of those previously mentioned hot topics, but also in how the current president is clearly up to no good and you have the choice of bringing the government's crimes to light at the risk of getting your boss arrested and your brother spirited away to a government black site, or letting them walk all over you and the people by regurgitating their jingoistic scapegoating lies about the nearby nation of Learis being the root of all problems faced by Novistanians.
That impactfulness comes from how Headliner is one of the few adventure games where decisions really make a huge difference, and the relative compactness of the game - both in that the "world" is a single street and that you only ever deal with a handful of topics - makes it easier for the developers to maintain their focus on how certain divisive subject matters can shift the public's attitude towards authority figures, technological advancement, and foreign nations. The length and replay aspect also do a fine job in ameliorating the build-up of tension that might ensue as you stand poised on a spiral of defeat, as playthroughs are short and you can hop into a fresh do-over if you should accidentally let your sibling overdose or get the president assassinated (I mean, shit happens). I can't say I fully enjoyed the game experience, given what I said in the lede about my anxieties with games of this type, but Headliner: NoviNews does as best a job as it can to sell me on the concept.
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