The only thing that bugged me from my hour of playing it is that whoever scanned the manuals for the gallery couldn’t be bothered to debind them so the scans all have a bright glow in the center of the booklets. Also instead of making each page of the manual its own page in the gallery, they’re put them in there two at a time to save space, I guess? So the western GBA manual scanned pages has 4 pages of the manual per 1 gallery page.
Also some of the scanned boxes have wear on the edges - Konami didn’t have any leftover stock for M2 to scan? They had to buy a crappy copy off ebay and scan that??? Poor guys
Games are good tho. I really appreciate the button remapping options!
i was playing aria a bit recently and it seemed to become a more interesting game when using short reach weapons, as it forced me to get in close to enemies and use the duck and backdash to retreat
This is taking some of the wind out of the sails of waiting for the analogue pocket to finally arrive, but it’s for the greater good.
I’m really digging replaying Circle.
My memory was a bit fuzzy as to why I never picked up the SNES Dracula X as a kid. I knew it was an inferior port from drooling over Rondo of Blood coverage in the import section of EGM way back when, but that was par for the course back then. Maybe omitting the CV2 village area of the first stage was inexcusable? If it was between this and Ogre Battle or NBA Jam, that’s enough to cost it, I guess. These games were expensive as hell after all. I remember renting it, but it left no impression. Now having replayed a bit of it, it kind of sucks? It’s really really stingy with the turkeys, and has a bit of an NES Ninja Gaiden vibe with the platforming and monsters feeling more sloppy difficult than reasonably difficult. It’ll probably grow on me eventually.
Yeah it’s an unimpeachable ~7-hour Search Action. Reminds me of Aria in overall pacing and in how satisfyingly animated all the basic actions like walking and drawing your bow are. Good vibes all around
I really loved wonder labyrinth but I feel like I should point out that its greatest strength is as an action game, the typical metroidvania lock and key level design is linear and rote to a fault. but it honestly has some of the best pixel art/animation/visual effects I’ve ever seen in a 2D game, and the action mechanics are more interesting and fleshed out than they need to be. the main gimmick is that is has ikaruga style mode-switching to both damaging enemies and absorbing attacks, and they have a lot of fun with that.
personally I think touhou luna nights is a much cooler game! it has grazing mechanics and more interesting level design.
That twin zombie dragon thing in circle of the moon is kicking my ass. I don’t remember any of these games being particularly hard. It’s kind of refreshing to have this much trouble though.
you can slide under them and not take damage if I recall. I think the strategy that worked for me is to continuously jump over and then slide under one of them, getting damage in while you can, until you take it out, and then the other one is a lot simpler to handle.
I don’t think circle of the moon is very good in the end, even if it remains underrated. has a lot of cool ideas, but the difficulty is annoyingly uneven and grinding for cards is miserable.
Yeah, even some of the regular monsters are a hassle. Those poison hornet things in that same area that go from hovering just out of range to instantly ramming into you seem to be there just to justify the subweapons. The werejaguar guys in the bell tower area just sort of kill your momentum while you bait their dash attacks. Maybe having a back-dash ability would make most of these guys more manageable or even a bit more fun to fight. Something to look forward to for Harmony, I guess.
Yeah, “unimpeachable” was maybe an odd choice of word on my part, I can think of several other indictments I might make of Deedlit if I were so inclined. It’s just I’m not inclined. I have complained about similar problems in other games, but they don’t seem to particularly matter in the context of this one. Same attitude I have to the Iga-Bloodstained for that matter, since we’re in that thread.
Some of it is simply that Deedlit is a cool character and I like spending time playing as her. Many of the games I idiosyncratically advocate on SB have a magnetic protagonist that keeps me focused and cheerful, constantly recentering my volatile attention from negative distractions elsewhere in the game. It’s like when you don’t notice the minor faults in someone (or frame them in a positive way) if you have a little bit of a crush on them
(Steam’s algorithm understood my taste level before I did because it loves to highlight to me games in the category “Female Protagonist” lol)
yeah I mean for what deedlit sets out to do I can’t really complain, I just feel obliged to temper expectations that it’s some kind of sprawling, amibitious metroidvania masterpiece. though the pixel art style and music vaguely recall symphony of the night I wouldn’t say it’s in that class of game at all, but I think that is one of the game’s key strengths. it focuses on what it does well.
Lodoss War seems like such a left field thing to base a game on 202X. What’s going on with that? Is there a new series or an anniversary or something? Or have the embers of passions for that elf girl just been smoldering underground that long like some sort of anime perv Centrialia?
I see absolutely no signs of theory A, so I’m gonna go with theory B. Plus, because A is not happening, that means an indie studio could have licensed the Lodoss IP for peanuts
(Imagine if we had a modernized copyright regime, this kind of IP resurrection by self-organizing now-professionalized fans could happen all the time. The usual problem is contacting the owners after it’s changed hands 7 times and is now jointly owned by 2 different holding companies neither of which can be bothered doing a 4-figure licensing deal)