Oh did I mention that I’m playing RS3 but I picked Sarah and wow what a surprise when I got to the final boss and could not use my MC who I had raised to be a spear toting triumvirate god, currently retooling the party to finish this thang (I wouldn’t call it grinding)
These SaGa games are wonderful toys
And there have been countless words written here and on other websites about the myriad of systems running under the hood of a SaGa game but it’s also a completely viable strategy to just use whichever characters you think look the coolest and play these things like you’re breaking FF8 for the first time
Not my video, of course, but a perfect encapsulation of just how fucking weird this game is. The uncanny slight voice modulation. The dialogue that feels like two characters almost having a real conversation, as dialogue is picked out of a hat and lines thrown at one another. It’s the auto generated side mission dialogue from AC Odyssey taken to the next level, and then some.
I truly, genuinely love it. It’s surreal.
I’m at the point now where I’m seeing how most of the NPCs you can recruit are sort of based on a handful of templates, with maybe different hair color, or a slightly different shade of skin. There’s a ton of clothing so they all look different in that regard, but I’ve seen at least a dozen variants of my undercut MMA lady around town.
Anyway, my character of choice lately is a Scottish woman who wears a lot of leopard print clothing, has blonde cornrows and speaks with strangely hollow, deep voice.
She also puts on a cardboard robot mask I found somewhere whenever she sneaks into enemy territory/fucks up and gets into combat.
Ring of Red
This one almost has me hooked.
The Konami dev team is a bit unusual with many veterans who worked on Iron Storm for the Saturn. That game was a straight strategy game with a wide scope. Ring of Red is much more ambitious. It’s set within an alternate post-WWII history and the combat is presented as a tense tug of war.
Instead of accepting the unconditional surrender of the Potsdam conference, a defiant Japan struggles for a few more years, eventually leading to its division into three states. Somewhere along the way, tank-like mechs are invented. The main character, Masami, is a half-Japanese, half-German recruit who appears reluctant to accept his Japanese heritage, preferring to go by his last name, Weizegger. This setup really has me curious to see where the story will go and I’m surprised to see characters written this well.
The combat also surprised me with its innovative melding of tactics and real-time action. It’s like two steps away from Valkyria Chronicles. You move your mechs around the map just like in Fire Emblem or Advanced Wars, but once you attack, you are put into a tug-of-war. Here, you have the option to move forwards or backwards, send troops to the front or rear, or line up a shot on the opponent’s mech. You’re never guaranteed to hit. Instead, you manage the probability of a hit through positioning and time spent aiming. It can actually be tense and exciting at times. Unfortunately, more often than not, it winds up feeling slow and drawn-out.
I’m uncertain that more strategy will be introduced or if I’ll be left to repeat these long waiting games. But I’m intrigued by the plot. I think I’ll play one more mission before I decide to put it down for good.
0 voters
Poll Time! There are some really obscure games for this season. Please look them up before you vote! Hopefully by leaving it as a single vote poll, I’ll avoid the problems from the last one. Top four will be selected.
Tsugunai: Atonement should’ve been called Loading Screens: The Game.
Shadow of Destiny is the most interesting of the lot and it’s by the character designer for Suikodens 1 and 4 (and I want to say a SoD character makes an appearance in Suikoden IV, even).
I didn’t mean to vote for Tsugunai. I would have voted for the Onsen game. But whatever, it is done.
I have strong opinions about Shadow of Destiny but I will wait before sharing them
I think it’s so fucking bad
finished ace combat 4 these days. delightful game.
i was so drawn into it i considered making a ng+ playthrough to unlock the really crazy aircrafts but decided to just replay ace combat zero in the near future.
i love how simple and honest the whole ensemble is. even though the guiding thread of the story happens on cutscenes inbetween missions, you actually feel (in some parts more than others) the story moving while playing. you’re always on control. it’s the half-life principle applied in a narrative about large-scale conflict.
there’s a part in the final mission where you must fly through a group of tunnels to destroy a target within. as you enter, your plane’s ground proximity warning system starts beeping and ordering you to pull up the aircraft. obviously you can’t do that, so the warning keeps flashing for a whole minute until you’re out of the tunnels. it’s a more elegant war-story design than any self-styled “serious” war games. so, so good.
Tsugunai sounded really cool with the celtic Mitsuda music and NPC possession mechanic but then you look up gameplay videos and it’s like only extremely slow 1 vs 1 battles against kobolds where you press attack and watch your character walk up to the kobold and miss
Still @MintyJuffowup I want your opinion about literally every game on that list and choosing is torture
nobody is going to vote technictix but consider
i voted shadow of destiny cause i want to hear some fresh views on it. played through it once like 10 years ago and don’t remember a thing.
OH THAT’S THE PREQUEL TO TECHNIC BEAT??
Here’s a photo I just took, right now, of my copy of Technic Beat. Please admire it wow
after I played shadow of destiny I thought that probably that game would of been better left to the imagination
i used to see ads for winback in video game magazines all of the time, but outside of the protagonist looking like a Resident Evil 2 character, it just seemed like an MGS knock-off or something. apparently, the perpetual magazine ads didn’t do much for the game because i’ve never heard anybody talk about winback.
This series is so interesting to me now and I can’t wait to try one.
I already regret this post this isn’t my photo okay I was making a joke but Technic Beat was cool, Ouendan totally ripped it off, Arika shoulda sued
I’m glad to hear you like reading my opinions! I’m trying to stay close to my 1/10 releases, but it’s getting hard to pass some of these by.
Wow, I had no idea you liked Funko so much.
voting for technictix purely because of the ridiculous ayako saso + shinji hosoe soundtrack
I rented Winback for the N64 one weekend many years ago and maybe the most interesting part of it to someone looking at it today is the cover system. To my mind I think it was one of the first games to have one.
