Have become mildly obsessed with a mobile game called Night of the Full Moon. It’s sorta like Slay the Spire but perhaps not as good. But it’s a very generous game in terms of content. I wouldn’t call this a recommendation necessarily but I’ve played through it with 3 characters so far and there do seem to be some plot threads to pull at if you keep playing.
Also, you’re occasionally faced with dialogue choices which (mostly) increase or decrease your Reputation and Courage stats, which seems to affect which bosses you can fight at the end and maybe some of the other encounters along the way?
This is so interesting to me, because my experience was the opposite: I loved WKTD, played through all endings in a single sitting, purchased it multiple times even, but I bounced off HWBM hard. I should really try it again one of these days.
i liked the character in wktd but i guess the setting and i’m not sure what else put me off? i also couldn’t manage to get more than one ending without having to look things up which i was too proud to do at the time. neptune is cool though. i liked her design and personality a lot. venus i felt very sorry for and i was wondering when thing were gonna go sideways with him eventually. my experience might also be tied to the fact that i met someone on okc who was obsessed with it and always talked about it. my experience with them was awkward so after i cut ties i think my opinion of the game soured a bit which is a shame.
Yeah, that all makes perfect sense; I’ve had similar reactions to Okami and Demon’s Souls, where the experience of the game was soured by the context in which I encountered it.
I’ve said before that WKTD made sense to me in part because of all the time I felt obligated to spend in the woods and at camps as a teen. That’s still true, but I think the bigger issue is that WKTD has such a simple structure: exactly seven binary or trinary choices arranged in an approximately symmetrical sequence. This simplicity gave it elegance. I’m sure HWBM probably has similar elegance, but I haven’t figured it out yet, which just made the game feel slippery somehow. I can’t hold on to it.
the only good thing about secret of mana is how it seems to jump out of what any sane person would think is possible with the super nintendo. it’s almost psychedelic in its maximalism. the actual game kind of doesn’t matter.
I really do wish it was actually fun to play. I can still enjoy it because I played it so obsessively as a child that the weird muscle memory patterns you have to learn to work around all the terrible hit detection/movement/menuing has stayed with me enough to convince myself it feels good to play in 2020 but it really doesn’t it just sucks lol it’s such an awful mess.
the shopkeeper says “Be seeing you”, implying that the Kingdom of Matango is some sort of Prisoner type situation. i welcome this interpretation
i have a soft spot for Secret of Mana but maybe that’s because it appealed to me as someone who never fully got on board with turn-based RPGS. if nothing else Secret of Mana has one of the best SNES RPG soundtracks.
i wish the game itself in secret of mana made me feel the way the intro does
like on multiple occasions ive started up a rom, and this music and that title screen just take my breath away. and then i get like an hour into the game and go ah fuck i don’t enjoy this
I mean, not to overstate the obvious but this seems more like a pop culture reference than videogame gibberish. Matango is my favorite Toho horror movie and lines like Mushroom 2’s seem like clear allusions to that movie.
im not sure how well it would hold up for me in retrospect, but i feel like the initial first few hours of SoM are pretty good for the way you kind of loop around through the world visiting different areas, with the cannon transport things sending you to kind of unexpected places and then you have to backtrack to figure out how all those locations fit together. the combat is kind of boring and bad but it just seems to have a different angle on ‘exploration’ than a lot of rpgs do that works really well for me. then when you finally get flammie and are able to see a birds eye view of the world you’ve been wandering around in it all starts to make sense. idk, i think its a cool game.
Oh yeah, I don’t want to start a pile-on. I think it is still valuable despite all the technical and mechanical issues; the grace it possesses cannot be robbed. It’s good to be honest in our view so we can realize how much its successors really did live up to its legacy.
no, the Matango stuff makes sense, what i mean by videogame gibberish is a mix of indefinite circling repetition (welcome to mushroom town! “mushroom” - that’s what we say in mushroom town. have you met king mushroom? welcome to mushroom castle) and tonally neutral filler text (traveller, there are wolves on the high road) that all blends together into a kind of weightless, depthless, nothing language, technically legible but emptied of content, which you don’t so much read as briefly trawl for clues about where you are right at that moment. i would say a videogame is well written when a one-line textbox immediately makes my eyes glaze over.
