They look like monsters fuck me eyes to you?
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still bothers me how ff6 had decent female characters and then they followed it up with… ff7. i think the series kind of rights its course a bit after that again though.
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Faris is the best Final Fantasy.
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The biggest whiplash is from FFX to FFX-2. Literally the same character Yuna changes from an FF7 type to… I can’t think of an exact analogy in previous FF games, something like an Atelier protagonist I suppose.
The second iteration of Yuna is way more fondly remembered by fans, it turns out. I feel there was a little bit of a missed opportunity in FFX-2 to show in a flashback how and why Yuna’s big makeover happened, but anyway it’s easy to sense that, you know, she just got over things. Yuna realized she doesn’t need to be a summoner for her life to mean something, and she doesn’t need a whole Male Defense Team around her either.
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I’m going to retcon you with my man hands
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there’s ham hock erasure going on and you point the gun at me
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Ham hocks aren’t… hands?
Best to take it in stride on this, I promise
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I am now so much very more interested in the proceedings.
Anyways in the first four or so hours Zero Time Dilemma is kind of a mess? It seems to have given up telling any kind of linear narrative, instead having you click on images that send you to various points on the timeline, except I assume it is multiple timelines so it is even harder to sort out. After every choice you make it feels like you get kicked back to the menu, so I end up just going back to the choice and picking the opposite option to see what happens except you rarely get to continue from either decision. The main result is at the moment I have no clue what is going on and the choices feel meaningless which… is a problem! But hey, because of the first two games I am pot committed and I can play it in bed, plus now I have an utterly absurd twist to look forward to!
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ham hocks is just a regional dialect variant of hand hocks.
since the blu ray of future boy conan got announced for a uk release today, i played the pc engine cd game based on it. it’s a fun, but basic platformer. maybe a little too basic for a 1992 release, especially visually speaking.
it has lots of voice acting and even an opening song, though.
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I finished Elea. They really kind of blew their load on cool visuals in the first hour. The second hour was non-puzzle adventure game with extremely janky unreal engine.
I still liked it a lot. These no-budget Unreal games can look amazing and their inherit jankiness instills the feeling of anything can happen. Feels like the edges of an NES game. Indie games usually instill this fear in me because I don’t see the edges at all. The whole world is there.
The sci-fi story between the ESL script, stilted voice acting, and incoherent high concept both immediately got me and baffled me. And it just suddenly ends. But again all that jank was charming.
Recommend it if it goes on sale for 1.50 again.
Still had more consistent verb interaction than Adios.
After seeing Game Grumps play a couple of trash Unreal Horror games it was fun to see what I take is stock camera stuff for unreal. And like every unreal game “we bought these assets we are going to use them dammit.”
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I finished Eternal Eyes yesterday. It bravely asks the question “what if Pokemon was a shitty SRPG on the PSX?” And it pretty much rules in all the ways I love games (ambitious in weird ways, extremely odd, not achieving its own goals, weirdly translated) and sucks in all the ways I can ignore (extremely easy, somewhat repetitive, obscure mechanics that turn out to actually be really simple).
I got this game when it came out (2000) for some fucking reason and I’ll never really know why. It’s haunted me since then, because I got intimidated by it and quit the game, but for some reason felt like I should 100% finish it some day. Well, that day was yesterday.
this is the level of translation we’re working with by the way. That’s a full sentence - it’s preceded by another character talking, so that’s all this guy said. There’s lots of weird shit like that.
Anyway, Eternal Eyes is an SRPG where you throw jewels at puppets (which are variously referred to as Magical Puppets, Magical Pappets, and Mappemon, but are clearly marionettes) to turn them into little monsters. Then you evolve the monsters by throwing more jewels at them, but it never reallllly tells you how that works. Instead, it comes down to trial and error. The spritework in this game for the puppets is so good though, like look at some of these little fuckers
There are a lot of palette swaps but I’m willing to be generous when the sprites are this good.
Anyway the strategy part of this is utterly laughable. The beginning of the game is “hit enemies until they die,” and there’s no real strategy except maybe retreating sometimes if your health is low. The mid-game is mostly discovering what spells are good (spoiler, most of them are the same to the point of having descriptions like “Same effect as Hammer”), and trying to figure out the sequence of jewels that will evolve your puppets.
The last third of the game game is figuring out the evolution method and just blasting your puppets to their last evolution which inevitably gives them spells that damage every enemy on the field, trivializing the entire game except for the last 3 battles which are extremely stupid.
The screen-clearing spells all have these incredible cutscenes that often don’t match the description at all. In fact, many of the descriptions for spells in this game are mixed up - the clearest case is that Sleep spells cause the poison ailment, and Poison spells make enemies go to sleep.
I am baffled that nobody has ripped and uploaded all the eternal eyes spell videos, they’re fucking weird and cool.
Also, the rarest and most powerful puppet is just straight-up named Alicia:
The last few battles are absurd because they’re practically the only battles where the enemy can heal, and all healing spells basically heal to full. So unless you can kill the healer in one turn, they’ll just keep healing themselves to full until they run out of MP, which can take upwards of 10 turns. Incredible shit.
They also seemed to realize that the screen-clearing magic was too powerful, so they gave most of the final enemies massive magic defense, but since I was so underleveled, I just kept leveling up in the middle of battle (which fully heals and restores MP) so I used the magic over and over until everyone else was dead, then just surrounded the boss and attacked until they ran out of MP or randomly decided to pass.
It’s such a bad game, I can’t recommend playing it at all, but I had a blast with it. The music is chill, the spritework is incredible at times, the translation is weird and funny, and it’s not very hard. Notably I streamed every second of it in Discord so that certainly made a difference. I don’t think I would have continued playing this if I couldn’t share it with my friends.
I didn’t even get close to completing the puppet list - since you have to evolve them all from scratch no capture mechanic) there was no way I was going to do that. But my final team (Hawking the magical broom, Alicia the…alicia, and Medusa Ball the beholder) were good enough for me.
The dream team:
The game’s plot is so straightforward as to be deceptive - @AutomaticTiger was convinced there was going to be a plot twist. There’s not.
My favorite dialogue boxes were these two, which were during an emotional moment where the main characters met their parents who were supposed to be dead. These two happen one after another, and it’s incredible:
Amazing game. Anyway, thanks to tigress, @stavekoff, @shrug, @Closed , @lonelyfrontier , and anyone else who hung out with me and got me through this weird fucken game. If you need me you can either find me chilling with the King of Gross or sailing in the Goondocks.
34 Likes
This sounds great and I am sad I missed it and I will never play it.
I am probably the reason you ended up playing it but it seems delightful.
oh yeah i forgot you mentioned it!! weirdly i had been thinking of streaming it like, 2 months ago but you were definitely the reason i remembered it haha
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Coming this fall, only on NBC:
My Name is ‘Blade Earl’
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Seconding the rec. These games are where surprises still regularly happen.
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I like how they shortened “Jewel” in the puppet description screen!
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i made it to the last boss in Final Fantasy V last night, and died right when he had one more “piece” left to kill. it was the double volley of meteos followed by some other aoe attack that totally wiped my party.
i expect the main issue is that i’m underleveled (everyone is either level 37 or 38), but yeah…haven’t had a gut punch like that in a while.
guess i gotta go grind a bit :\
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noooo
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Played Left 4 Dead for the first time last night. In both maps I died right as the rescue vehicle arrived. I think that game is only Okay. It hasn’t aged all that well.
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