I died on floor 203 (out of 224 or so?) in Void Stranger, and it wasn’t even a completely fair one I was trying to switch my HP and locust numbers and miscounted how many moves the “you have X number of swaps before we kill you” statues allowed and died with that block not filled in, which instantly wiped me out. Just utterly gutted, it took 4-5 hours to get that far even on a second loop!
So this loop is screw it, gonna abuse hidden mechanics to warp back from floor 140 to 107 but give myself 40 locusts and just loop those 30 floors until I have the 80 or so locusts I need to warp ahead to the final feeling checkpoint tree.
i assumed it has something to do with how jumping kind of summons bridges (saving you time/risk of getting Eye spy’ed but also creating more paths for wandering enemies)
Oh is Time and Eternity actually good? That’s great news. I couldn’t find out if it had anything going for it aside from its looks so I’ve only yet admired it from afar.
a cool thing about crosstown is that it goes up to four players, and each player you add makes the game’s sound exponentially more cacophonus (and therefore funnier). with a full cohort, it’s almost deafenning!
It’s really nice so far. I realize there’s this happy accident occurring as I play the game like this where the framing device that I am an outsider in a land that is strange to me allows me to simulate, to some extent, a western-like experience where I am a gringo in Mexico. Like, my time so far has been spent painfully trying to understand and talk to people in town for about 40 minutes at a time, before I exhausted bail on society and flee to the wilderness where I can slap fauna and collect bug parts to an hour or two later sell, wordlessly, to some vendor in town before making another retreat. A bug is also causing my journal to update with text that is sometimes written English and sometimes written Spanish, which is a wildly enjoyable enhancement to the experience I am talking about. El Gringo en Vvardenfell.
Very weird fantasy I am participating in here. Like I am CIA agent sent to Vvardenfell, and my decisions may yet spur or prevent a civil war in the region because I got my words mixed up.
Played some Deadlock for the first time in like 6+ months. I didn’t know the new map. My builds are all slightly different. All my muscle memory is gone. Got rolled pretty bad and someone on our team was an asshole. that’s Deadlock baybe
So far, Hundred Line : Last Defense academy is a Danganronpa team / Zero escape team collab the same way Elden Ring is a FromSoft / George RR Martin collab. → I have seen none of the Zero Escape DNA (that isn’t already present in Danganronpa) It is 100% Team Danganronpa
And the main things differentiating this one game from the Danganronpas is
a SRPG battle system (VN is still the primary focus)
light Persona-ish scheduling
no killing game
Uh it seems to be mega long
Sign of the times, the SRPG battles are slightly puzzle-y like Into the Breach / Metal Slug Tactics / Mario & Rabbids. There’s no xp, character progression is very incremental. Numbers are kept very low (Paper Mario levels) and you can get by without optimizing too much. It nicely manages to accomodate good and bad players in battle - there’s strategic depth looking for the One Perfect Turn, but there are enough mechanics in place to save you if you screw up.
These games………… have not become more respectable.
Pretty much all the characters are one-note and immediately unlikable. I had a mix of an amused / horrified response when each of them were introduced and I kept thinking « ok I fucking hate this one. hope the next one is better… » again and again…
One character’s entire personality is (spoiler for gross) he keeps suggesting he might have an incestuous relationship with his twin sister. We get at least TWO edgelords who want to kill everybody in the cast. Another character is self hating to an overly exaggerated degree. Somehow all these annoyingly quirks quickly came back around as funny after a while - just seeing the hundred different ways the writers manage to have the characters reinforce their inane obsessions. This works for me right now but this is a precarious balance
The total anime page-turner twisty story works for me as usual. I love it when the protagonist goes « oh no, Something wrong is going on. I have to open this door » and the game gives me back control to make me click on the door. I always linger a bit in those moments to appreciate them instead of immediately opening the door
Rain code was a fool me once situation. I think I’m glad I’m missing this one. I heard there’s a hundred endings but not sure how feasible that is. Is it just like Nier Automata?
