I may be basing this off stumbling through the game in low level Japanese 10 years ago but always felt Saga wasn’t tactical enough. I never really had to rethink or try really hard the whole game. The ideal strategy always laid out in front of me.
Then again I played it when I was a moron in Japanese and now if I played Azel maybe I’d think it was good.
It is on the list of Saturn games barely holding it together bursting at the seems of what is possible on the system. Which is really cool aesthetic that only existed in that time frame.
I looked for it at the time but can’t think of a Dreamcast/PS1-2/64 games that have the same feeling as Saga or Burning Rangers. Of causing the hardware to scream and seeing the seams as it displays what is utterly possible.
Possible examples before I close this post:
PS360 Dragon’s Dogma which more just feels like “this wasn’t meant for this hardware.”
Perfect Dark except that also uses the expansion port but does have a similar je’nais se quoi.
Those PS3-4 cross ports that by all accounts run pretty good
This time I use keyboard as input like play this game on a real MSX machine and also read a Japanese guide to collect most of the elves in the level. My Ninja could increase DX up, got enough damage to hit the final boss
I’m trying to learn how to play the koei three kingdoms games, starting from the first one. It’s so fascinating how opaque these games are. Even the game FAQs page doesn’t actually tell you how to play the game
My plan is just to sort of trial and error my way through a campaign on one before moving on to the sequel. I assume they will become more complicated with each iteration, but also potentially actually explain more of what the hell is happening
It’s also funny to see the same phenomenon that always happens with a sim game where someone asks online like some fundamental question about how to start playing, and the first response is like 8 paragraphs about a strategy to create a foundation for the ideal midgame scenario, then the person responds “no like what button do I press to move my guy”
As a child my grandmother gave me a copy of Nobunaga’s Ambition for the Nintendo Entertainment System and I was very confused by this, I was not sure why she chose that game over all other games, but I thought “Maybe it’s cuz this box art says BEST SELLER IN JAPAN? Maybe she took that as a mark of quality? Even though she was a first generation American who was all about buying Made In America goods? But she also did go to Japan at least once, she told me all about how powerful the sumo were, she did take me to a Japanese restaurant at least once a month at a time when that was somewhat uncommon, yes I’m gonna say my grandmother knows what’s going on.”
Yeah you could say I was precocious.
Anyway now I’m sure she bought that game cuz the toy store gave her a sweet deal on it but as a pre-pubescent it taught me a valuable lesson, thanks grandmother. But at the time I was like “I’m gonna wake up early every day this week and play a Nintendo game for an hour before school” but I gave up on like day 2 cuz I realized the game was mostly about rationing out rice and I was like “why would I ever do this when I could be playing Kickle Cubicle, fuck rice paddies” so I was even more precocious than you thought.
Later on I bought at least half of Koei’s PS2 sims and pretended my child-self was wrong, that there was much joy to be had in rice paddies, but no, that was foolish, I spent like $100 total on all those games and I never learned how to romance a single kingdom and I will not take responsibility for this. It’s all on Koei’s shoulders. Not mine.
As a kid, my friends and I got the floppies for the PC release of Nobunaga’s Ambition and we sure did play that shit on his old Compaq, one of the suitcase ones with the tiny green screens. And we sure did never figure out how to play that shit.
Also because I was a kid doing this, I was not all about reading that name well, and so it wasn’t until I played Samurai Warriors 1 years later that I figured out his name wasn’t Nobunga.
Streets of Rage 4 (PS4)
tried giving this another chance, but no soap. i still have nothing but ardent loathing for virtually every little part of it, from the visuals to the music to the grades the devs assign you at the end of each level- as though it were any business of theirs.
Steam library roulette lead me to play recent acquisition Clawfish. In it, you visit a semi-submerged train station, where you loiter around, catching fish from claw machines and releasing them into the water. You can sit on a bench, buy a drink from a vending machine, and basically just soak in the vibes. Not a bad way to spend 40 minutes if the weather in your part of the world is dreary on a given day.
Genuinely pondering the possibilities of retrofitting a claw machine into a fish tank (obviously not actually using the claw on them!)
Update: I found a yt video that is an hour long and purports to be an introduction to the first game, but the first 20 minutes or so are just the guy resetting over and over again to try to goose the rng into letting him recruit Lu Bu on his first turn
Ghost Recon Breakpoint is fucking stupid in every possible way, but the “immersive” mode makes it essentially everything I want from an AAA game. It’s much more focused, no icons on the screen, minimap is just a compass, no loot levels, mission markers are explained in text so you have to find them yourself, no icons over baddies so I can’t see them through walls, etc. It’s not like, hard, but it’s really fun to fuck with.
I’m really into it despite all theHOORAH TROOPS shit and total dissonance between SERIOUS OPERATOR STUFF and the fact that I can get shot 4 times and only lose 1/3 of my health, and also it heals back in 8 seconds.
The vehicle physics are garbage but the shooting is amazing.
