10 - tokyo crash mobs
This is a Puzz Loop spinoff developed by Mitchell themselves. Actually when it said copyright 1998 I thought it was a port of some obscure ps1 game. That’s just the year Puzz Loop came out. But it really has the vibe of a later japanese ps1 game like suzuki bakuhatsu.
In the original Puzz Loop, you have a shrinking line of primary colored balls. This game instead uses people (“scenesters”) wearing monochrome outfits. You have to pick up & throw the people into each other to clear away the line, so you can try to be as close to the front as possible. They are called scenesters because they are supposed to be standing in line for something trendy that’s about to open. The game has excellent fmv cutscenes / digitized sprites / voices.
9 - super mario 3d land
Lately I feel like opinions on this game have cooled down a little bit, or maybe it was just one or two selectbutton posts I read. Personally, i haven’t played super mario odyssey yet, but that looks way closer to my ideal kind of 3d mario game, i.e. sort of excessive and uneven. I didn’t replay 3d land for this thread but I mostly just remember one or two of the bowser’s castle levels, those were pretty cool. Anyway i’m trying to say that 3d mario games are inherently dumb and shouldn’t try being masterpieces for purists like 3d land, save that for the 2d marios, instead give me weird stuff to explore and lots of it.
8 - Picross e series
When I got into picross finally during the making of this thread, I was ready to call it my favorite game-as-pastime and maybe put it at #1 as kind of a joke. At this point though picross to me is basically a flowchart where I do one of like 4 things, and some of those things involve just counting how many blocks are in a row over and over again. So it’s not #1 unfortunately…but these 3ds picross games are very nicely presented, especially coming from mario’s picross on the game boy which i was trying to beat on the virtual console.
7 - smt ds soul hackers
I have fully swung around from thinking soul hackers looked cool, to playing it and eventually getting tired/angry with it, to thinking about it now and deciding it’s great actually.
Earlier I was saying how the original smt and the series in general aspires to much older/crustier rpgs. Back in the series heydey the interesting thing with each new release was how much they added or what direction they took it to try and “modernize” the game. Persona 1-2 was probably the furthest & most decisive step they took at the time, but devil summoner / soul hackers is a kind of half step, for the hardcore saturn owners I guess. It feels on par in scope and ambition with the super famicom games, if they didn’t use such high fidelity character portraits then they could have released it on the sfc probably. it doesn’t really do much with its incredible setting/premise, but in hindsight I actually kind of like how laid back it is. I also think it’s neat how you and your girlfriend are the only human characters in the party, the rest is all demons you recruit. that was one of the things that annoyed me the first time…with a full party you burn up MAG pretty quickly.
6 - gaist crusher god
It’s time for the world to stop making jokes whenever somebody talks about the demise and/or rebirth of treasure co. ltd, ironically wishing for a sequel to gaist crusher. gaist crusher is legit pretty good.
My only frame of reference for this type of game is the cavia-developed Naruto game for the ps2 (which I made my friend buy because he liked Naruto and I wanted to see another cavia game in action), but I assume this format of game is pretty common. The format is: long cutscene->flat 3d stage with invisible walls & waves of enemies->another long cutscene. Is that really, at the end of the day, spiritually different from guardian heroes?
It has a fun gimmick between waves of enemies…the invisible walls disappear and a glowing point appears in the distance. You have to run to the point. then new invisible walls come up and you start fighting again. what’s cool is that you inexplicably start running like 50 MPH during these parts, and the camera dramatically lowers and goes behind your shoulder. (mysteriously there was exactly one glowing point during the final stage that you had to press A to teleport. so if you kept running at the point without pressing A, your body would just spin around that point with the camera whirling at vomit speed.)
Anyway so in this game you change forms between “mail form” and “weapon form”. In mail form you use your fists…in weapon form your armor peels off and transforms into a giant…weapon. It should have been obvious from how I just described it, but at first I couldn’t figure out the point of changing forms. I thought they were shouting “main form”. your defense is severely lowered during weapon form! duh. seriously, you had better be dodging every attack, especially boss attacks, during weapon form.
Speaking of dodging, you can only dodge in weapon form. The same button, when in mail form, causes a force field bubble to come out…you can also charge the bubble. whether you dodge or deflect, when you time it right, a very Treasury sound effect plays…it’s very nice.
There is a shonen-game collectable aspect to this game, that manifests as a treasure-like celebration of action game hit-button-feel-good. When you beat a boss you get a chance to obtain their representative mail/weapon. (“crash chance!”) you can then use that new mail/weapon (“geist”) on future stages. The geists all have elemental types and stats, and they are wildly different in appearance and attack pattern. some are fast swords, some are spears that you slowly twirl, some are just guns…every one has a uniquely fine tuned feel to it, and unique animations. It feels like a game with dozens of playable characters when there are really only a handful. there are a lot of missions, including missions that you repeat under different conditions, so you are supposed to collect them all and have different experiences with the various geists.
Also the bosses are somewhat monster-hunter like where you just stab the fuck out of something that is ten times the size of you, but you can also charge up your meter & transform into whatever boss you got your currently equipped geist from, and have a brief little kaiju battle.
I’ve already explained this to my mom a bunch of times, but gaist crusher “god” is just an expansion that contains the entire original game plus more missions, and it also tweaks a couple minor things that I noticed at the time but don’t remember anymore. (I think the cutscenes are easier to skip.) You can even transfer your save file. so it didn’t sell that badly for an expansion…I don’t think it single handedly killed treasure or whatever.
My biggest complaint with this game is the lack of grunt enemy variety, it’s a little ridiculous…but when 95 percent of the enemies are just palette swaps, it is shocking and enjoyable whenever you see those other 5 percent pop up. Also I find it funny that there is a GUI element that shows you how many waves/sub-areas until you reach the boss. It’s literally always the same number of areas in every stage.
