Wait, Lady Butterfly wasn’t early on?
I’m pretty sure I beat her before I beat Genichiro.
she’s potentially early on – unlike dark souls, where the pacing and balance goes slack after the big midway point, sekiro is if anything the opposite, where it’s possible to have a pretty sloppy time of the early game and avoid learning to play it the way it wants you to, especially if you happen not to prioritize some of the bosses that seem better at teaching the mechanics (like the centipede and lady butterfly)
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I’m fairly hooked. Some of the (often changing) mechanics will fuck your brain. Feels real nice when you get a good set up going. There can be a real flow of optimization.
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It’s kind of interesting and clever what Sekiro does there.
You get the key item letting you make progress in the main path early in Hirata Estate, before fighting the first boss. But, it doesn’t look like a key item, it looks like a combat tool without necessarily a progression use. As I recall, if aiming for the regular ending, the rest of Hirata Estate is a totally optional path whose reward is the additional resurrection.
Because you can’t resurrect twice on the same boss phase and it takes time to charge, that’s in fact a low-value powerup, certainly nothing worth the long early-game struggle to obtain. But nothing proves the rest of Hirata Estate is optional, especially since From has never sent players down an optional path so early before, so almost every player plows ahead at least until they get stuck on a difficult part (and when they do they sometimes complain the game is unfair, which they would probably not say if it was clear it was optional).
Also, if you do beat Lady Butterfly in the early game after heroic efforts, you’re actually happy to get the second resurrection, it sounds like a fantastic reward. You gradually realize it doesn’t make too much difference later.
Overall it’s a real labyrinth of player expectation management on multiple levels. From hasn’t stopped experimenting with game layouts and pathing, they’re still trying weird new tricks. What all this is ultimately in service of, I’m not sure though, in the grand scheme of things it might be a failed experiment.
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Valuing punishment, sadism, and frustration as experiential goals lets them be so much more experimental or expressive in these structures.
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Weird driving game Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions (A.K.A. Double S.T.E.A.L) for Xbox
and it’s significantly less punishing / broken, but Japanese-exclusive sequel, Double S.T.E.A.L: The Second Clash
I think I would heartily recommend the latter, but while the former is definitely also graphically impressive it has significant physics and game design problems which make it a slog to play through much of.
The sequel improves on a lot of it, and just has a lot of the polish the former lacked, and honestly its a crime that it wasn’t ever released in the west, presumably due to being a 720p-capable game launching right up against the Xbox 360.
I really need to figure out what “S.T.E.A.L” is supposed to stand for…
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Getting my $3 worth out of Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Plays kind of like Crimson Shroud.
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That game had the Calibur effect one me and I gotta delete a “w” every time I write “reckless”
And I never even played the damn thing
I remember “Xbots” online love that game cuz it has some super fancy reflection tech or some shit like that
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Stealing
To
Eat
A
Lot
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Finally got round to starting Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin. I’m not very far in but this game has huge ‘ps2 gem’ energy. The voice acting has this grain to it that makes it sound like 2003. Gotta go hunt before I can attend to my paddy but I think I love it.
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i am considering to start playing Paradise Killers on the Switch. does it have the same kind of Suda51 vibes that Silver Case has?
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There’s definitely some influence there. The characters generally have a much more cheery vibe but the overall aesthetics, especially in the music and sound design are very Silver Case.
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i sat down to play Panzer Dragoon Saga yesterday. it’s very cool being able to get to the end of the first disc in like 2 hours. rad game.
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Wow, I think I love Mega Man Battle Network. I’m most surprised by how much I am lapping up the world. It’s so hilarious to me that this cute pastel town is under constant threat from a mysterious terrorist organization that takes advantage of society’s over-reliance on “smart” technology. First, kitchen ovens start exploding. Then the school’s tablets brainwash children into committing crime. Currently, the water has been shut off and now everyone is saying that they can’t talk because it wastes saliva. This rules.
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“There is a glitch in Quake where the player can lose one of his/her Runes.”
i just experienced this on completing episode 2. my episode 1 rune is just gone for some reason? what the hell? there’s a cheat to get around this but would be nice if i just didn’t have to do that
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Gafgarion definitely fucks!
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Gafgarion should get his own Disney Plus series
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Pony Island probably shouldn’t be more than like 20 minutes long. Or at least, that’s about how long I was willing to put into it before I sorta went “okay, I get it.”
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yeah they went really over the top on lighting and shader tech, to the extent that neither game has a Japanese Wikipedia article, but the bloom tech (which Masaki Kawase gave talks about at GDC and its Japanese equivalent back in 2002-2004) does, lmao
also the game features about sixteen different pixel shader filters (you can see them in the later slides of the GDC presentation linked form Wikipedia) it’ll flick through on replays, most of them make the game absolutely unreadable but they were so excited you can’t help but find it cute now
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Me, 9, finishing Zelda LA on the gameboy, crying: This ending is so unfair… but I understand why you woke the windfish up, Link. Death is inevitable and should be accepted. The people of Koholint will live on in your memories
Me, 34, finishing Zelda LA on the switch: Link… wtf why did you wake the fish up. Idiot
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