We don’t have an Onion Games thread. That’s kind of strange!
I should have made one before Yamada-kun went offline. Good bye Yamada-kun. You were a fine premise filled with weird things.
Then there is Million Onion Hotel. It’s a cool weird stressful puzzle game that playing in public makes you look like a crazy person.
Now a real game! Black Bird on switch. It’s a Fantasy Zone like about a little girl abandoned by the world and that loneliness, sadness, anger twists into a Black Bird that will cast vengence on the world that mistreated her.
It’s pretty good! It being a shooter I am certain you will be shocked to hear all the reviews call it too short and with limited replay value. You should have to pay a fine that goes to house the homeless if you call a shooter too short with limited replay value.
Black Bird is 50% off for the next few days. I really liked it.
i’ve also enjoyed both Onion Hotel and Black Bird. i feel like i need to spend more time with the latter to really figure out its scoring system, though.
never played Dandy Dungeon series, but it seems cute.
Somehow Dandy Dungeon’s mobile game monetization nonsense is the only time I got mad about it, probably because the underlying game is actually good and I would have rather just paid $35 to play it on 3DS or something
Now that the online service has ended Dandy Dungeon was updated to allow offline play but I don’t know if anything was re-balanced (if it needed anything to adjust for no microtransactions).
I feel like I did that and yet still it was doing “you can’t play anymore today” to me for some reason. Or maybe there was a hellacious grind. I hit some kind of wall where I was spending too much time waiting
Whoa hey thanks for the heads up on Black Bird, as everyone should just get that. It rules. It wants you to play as fast and hard as you can. It is dark as hell.
Damn these people know how to make some VIDEOGAAAAAAMES.
Black Bird didn’t do too much for me. The stages all look fairly similar through the sepia filter, and I was kind of hoping for a shop or other ship customization. It did make me want to replay Fantasy Zone, though!
This thread caused me to realize I’ve never played Fantasy Zone, which caused me to realize I’ve never unlocked it in Yakuza 0, which caused me to go back to my half-finished game of Yakuza 0 to bum around the arcade.
Yeah this game is real good and trying to figure out the scoring system has been very satisfying. Generally when non-shooter devs dabble in the genre the games are bloated or showpiece-y or loaded down with RPG bullshit but this seems pretty tight mechanically.
Though if a full playthrough of this thing is longer than 25 minutes I will come back and tear it to shreds.
I haven’t gotten Black Bird yet but that’s one of the best part of Million Onion Hotel. Much like an onion, you keep pulling back layers and learning more about how scoring works, which in turn lets you progress farther and eventually discover there were even more mechanics that were completely going over your head. Trying to learn how to play the game is probably 3/4 of Million Onion Hotel’s “game”.
A bit of a downer as far as it’s personality goes though. As in it’s more bleak than you’d expect, not that it’s bad.
I haven’t played Dandy dungeon in a while so I’m just going off memory BUT:
In Dandy dungeon you play as a middle aged game developper at night with an office work during the day. Every day he tries out one of his dungeons (that’s the game part of Dandy Dungeon), always rescues a captured princess in game, and always dreams of kissing her.
The main character the programmer coded in his game is an obvious stand-in for him, and the princess is an obvious stand-in for a young schoolgirl he briefly meets at the beginning of the game and that he’s madly in love with.
Every day after completing a dungeon she passes in front of his house and the LOVE % gauge appears. The idea is that that programming the game will allow the programmer to eventually impress the girl enough to get her.
Now - the key thing is that the Love % gauge starts at 0%, and doesn’t actually progress, ever, as you finish dungeons. It just stays at 0%, forever, as the programmer lusts over his half-plus-seven-incompatible crush every day after finishing a dungeon.
So yeah! The game knows that this unrequited love is creepy and the main character really is way too old to believe that his derivative wish fullfilment RPG is going to impress this like 18 at most girl. This is such a good, brutal and unexpected move on the player and a condemnation of a certain form of escapism that I didn’t expect at all from this game. Honestly the coolest part about it.
Imagine how disapppointed I was when it turned out later on that, actually, no, the love % gauge does eventually rise, never for a good reason, you just need to reach certain plot points, and eventually the programmer rescues the schoolgirl In Real Life and marries her and it’s never not creepy nooooooooo
