That is a thing in the dungeon crawler tradition in general. I remember having the same confusion in Lands of Lore and Grimrock 2 about areas I later realized were definitely just the next area on the main quest line. Not just due to poison but intimidatingly lethal, don’t-even-think-of-facing-this-head-on threats of all sorts
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I love it! It’s where player skill in execution interacts really nicely and complexly with progressive stat growth and path freedom. I don’t know if it survives unless the difficulty is cranked to lethal but that tension and problem solving in determining optimal path is one of the strongest reasons I like high difficulties.
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In Lands of Lore there was a dungeon whose first floor was a hallway with two entrances from different parts of the overworld, with a door in the middle to the staircase. Between the door and the staircase there is an invincible guardian who takes no damage from any attack. I got in by luring the guardian to one entrance, then taking the long way round the overworld to the other entrance, and then running to the staircase before it caught up
I then spent about 6 hours completing the dungeon and then went back up to the exit and found the invincible guardian blocking my way out, as I hadn’t run quite fast enough to avoid that problem. After puttering around further in the dungeon hoping against hope there was another exit, I abandoned my first playthrough
I picked up the game again a few years later and discovered the solution to the guardian was a particular green skull item generating a poison fog that is the only thing that damages it. I had dropped the skull somewhere earlier when I ran out of inventory space
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Yeah the first time I played CoTM I did that by pure accident as well. I figured an item or something was going to pop up a bit more inwards and then I get so inwards I clear the area.
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So glad to see my old Circle of the Moon opinions vindicated! It’s a good game though not good enough to be among the other greats in the series but still quite enjoyable on its own terms. I’ve played it multiple times over the years but have yet to complete Thief mode though I think I have multiple Thief mode saves floating around here or there.
I really like the three GBA Castlevanias. I fell off the series after the first or second DS game though.
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That GBA (maybe DS) Collection has to be announced at TGSOnline right?
It leaked way back in April.
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Hey I finished Sakuna. RICE GAME.
It continued to be thoughtful and beautiful. I still feel bad for those two early stumbles.
That a game made me consider my food more. The work it took to create. And that I should be grateful for it’s existence is wonderful. The game also has the theme of found family and growing to be the better you. It remained near overwhelmingly gorgeous.
When I came back to it after six months I was very close to the end and it dropped two real wild twists on me that I had to remember “oh yeah that does happen in Japanese folklore.”
It never insults a “Christian” missionary for still believing in Big G even though she was in heaven and meeting a dozen Japanese lower G.
Battle system quickly gets to IDK lol. It has a lot of systems I never figured out.
Wonderful Game though. Recommend it to everyone.
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Wario Ware get it together is about as good as the demo suggests, I love it. It’s a lot harder than the usual WW if you insist on using every character, including the cursed 9 and 5 volts
My favorite thing about these games is the unhinged delirious positive reinforcement (see the screenshots thread) you get over and over for like pushing a button for 2 seconds. It feels both contagiously hilarious taken at face value, and also like a jab at every other videogame
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what’s the general opinion on Castlevania Legends? I don’t have a good baseline for non-SotN derived 'vanias so I’m curious how that one in particular holds up
Asking for a friend (who is writing a blog post about every game boy game alphabetically)
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Castlevania Legends is the third Game Boy Castlevania game and before you said anything I didn’t even know there was a third Game Boy Castlevania game. But I think if it’s on a par with the other two then my opinion of it is that it’s probably not half bad if you can meet it on its own terms.
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haven’t played it myself, but the general opinion from what i’ve heard is that it’s kinda middling
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okay that’s kinda what i thought.
the whole first level you get hearts, but you literally cannot use them because the game only gives you “soul weapons” as rewards for killing bosses? weird design choice
anyway weird game, not sure i like it, music is kinda bad, but i generally don’t like oldschool vania
also i don’t think i like harmony of dissonance that much
harmony of dissonance is pretty bad
the A tier castlevanias are: 1, rondo, symphony, and curse of the moon 1/2
B tier is: 3, circle of the moon, bloodlines, ritual of the night
(S tier is la mulana even though that’s technically a maze of golvellius-like, it’s impossible not to recommend it over the portable titles)
Honestly I don’t think you gain much grouping post-Symphony with the earlier games, they have so few shared values
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I do so sparingly mostly because curse of the moon is more of a CV3-like, ritual of the night and circle of the moon are both explicitly responding to symphony itself rather than the GBA/DS series, and symphony is still pretty damn good and its level design goals, especially early on, are very recognizable as a followup to rondo even if the late game is grossly (delightfully) maximalist
also I think a lot of the later GBA/DS games are just bad and so I don’t see the need to rhetorically establish a separate Iga genre for comparison purposes
castlevania 3 is the one that’s usually overrated imo, it feels like konami trying to make a capcom game, the whole thing is really visually and mechanically incoherent, and mostly succeeds because the music is great and the cast is neat and it has some genuinely solid gimmicks (it’s closer to 4 in that regard than people remember)
curse of the moon is such a better CV3
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we finally finished el shaddai about a year and a half after starting. playing this sporadically honestly enhanced the dissociative dreamy insubstantiality of the narrative (and gameplay), i could never remember what was going on or what they were talking about whenever we picked it up again and felt right at home sleepwalking through its beautiful shallowness as a result. jeans
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I agree with all that (well, even if the latter GBA and DS games have lost their inspiration they’re still clearly the same bones as Symphony), and I don’t mean it as a slight against the Symphony turn – and it’s fun to see which aesthetics are reused and reinterpreted when the fundamental game pieces are so very different in the loose expansive games. They’ve always got a history to look back at and because the aesthetic identity of Castlevania is so defined-but-non-specific they are always working in that tension. I think we all have a strong sense of what constitutes the Castlevania texture, but when you ask: does that mean Frankenstein’s monster? Does that mean Victorian horror? Does that mean anime demon horror? – they’re always live questions and worth asking and testing.
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Installed “The Artful Escape” cuz I’ve got Gamepass, stared at the icon for a bit to try to convince myself it was worth giving a shot, couldn’t do it. Decided to look up interviews/trailers to see if that would interest me. Read a couple and the designer kept saying he doesn’t like music games, doesn’t really know much about games at all, multiple references to Spielberg/Wes Anderson as the goal. Talked about how he didn’t plan on having VO but then Annapurna suggested stars & he was psyched, and ended one interview saying “Invest in bitcoin!”. Uninstalled “The Artful Escape”.
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