This specific mechanic is maybe the funniest thing I encountered in the game (which I did not complete). I can’t think a more perfect poisoning of the feeling you get picking up gems in most video games.
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You may want to try Curse of Greed: Ultimate one day.
Okay found out how to continue in… Glittermitten Grove (do I still need to keep this up, it’s been four years) as my unfamiliarity with ZZT meant I didn’t know that certain things reset between sessions or how to even read parts of the screen.
Anyways it seems… bad? Maybe I keep hitting the worst parts (last thing I saw was a toaster), or as a concept it worked better some years back, or maybe personally playing a couple hundred mostly tiny indie games at random over the past year beforehand means I did legitimately what the game is trying to simulate but… if I had to describe my first ninety or so minutes with the game I’d say it was just boring and that’s rather unexpected.
I should go apologize to The Hex, it now retroactively seems much more inspired.
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It was received with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. Frog Fractions 3 is a lot better unless you really like ZZT. I like ZZT so it’s a bit closer for me, but TBH I can’t remember much of any of the minigames so that’s a bad sign.
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I’ve been playing both Pikmin 3 Deluxe and Helldivers cooperatively. It is now my fervent hope that Pikmin 4 has infinite procedurally generated alien planets to conquer (assassinate ladybugs, steal all fruits).
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haven’t been playing games much lately but found an undub of smt4 on an external drive and hey i’m two hours in
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I like how dragon’s dogma handles the night, how I’m looking up to check where the sun is before I decide to head off on another quest
I like how botw took a lot of things from this game and made something much more playable
I’m glad that i also get to appreciate how these things were done in its original form
I hope ff16 is like this, i may buy a ps5 if that’s the case
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What I want is to fine-tune the bingo battle stages. I want to be able to choose what’s on the cards. Let me make a card that is all blue marbles. Let me make one that’s just monsters. I like the variety that’s present but it’s a bummer when you draw the same stage with the same setup twice within a half hour.
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now that I’m blowing through the quests I didn’t do in Genshin (give me mats and money you fuckers), I’m enjoying that the plot of the game boils down to “your gods don’t give a shit about you”
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Today I played
Shiren 5: Made a few more attempts at the post-game lake dungeon that magically vanishes dropped items and gives all scroll and grass items random names with effects not found in the main dungeon (a few of them capable of ending a run there and then). The last time I spent with this had me building spreadsheets which turned out to be utterly futile, and so now every run feels almost totally dependent on luck with the odd saving grace of being only able to drop/sort items at shops (also not common). I’m only peeved by all this because I managed 28 out of 30 floors on my second run that was done without recognizing the shop exploit
Yoshi’s Island: Got annoyed with trying to 100% the first level and kept getting hit because I am impatient and want to unlock the hidden stages in this otherwise breezy game. Ugh…
Super Bomberman 2: Hadn’t revisited this one since owning it Back In The Day and had a pleasant time doing the first two worlds. I liked the ramp in complexity by the middle of the 2nd world and will probably return to it soon. Also the wall sprites are incredibly similar to ALTTP
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I’m doing a full replay of Chrono Trigger for the first time since I was in middle school. It’s a game that was very exciting and evocative for a 12 year old. It felt like there was real depth to its world. Today, it’s light, breezy candy with great aesthetics and music. It’s beautiful to look at, but the emotional beats aren’t landing for me at all. It’s completely shallow shonen stuff but it works well for what it is. I dunno. It’s a good time but I’m not moved.
That side quest with Robo gardening for 300 years and Lucca time traveling to save her mom is definitely the emotional highlight of the game, but it drops those events one after another and speeds through them. The whole thing took about 10 minutes to get through. It’s neat conceptually but it doesn’t land the way it could.
I’m probably gonna play through Chrono Cross next, and I’m really looking forward to the strangely pervasive melancholy in that one.
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i think a big part of the impression chrono trigger makes is atmosphere, especially if you’re someone who hasn’t like watched a lot of animes yet or whatever. it’s kind of easy to mistake that atmosphere for depth.
i do still think it’s like the best possible version of jrpg as several-seasons-of-a-cartoon-series though
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Yeah, I will say that playing this made me really want to watch a long, drawn out Chrono Trigger anime in the style of something like Dragon Ball. I can feel it straining against the limitations of a 16 bit game.
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this may not have been what you meant and I’m being pedantic I think it strains far less than Secret of Mana or FFVI, actually – both of those were scoped at a time when they really wanted CD audio at a minimum, whereas with Chrono Trigger and Mario RPG once they had 4MB cartridges and (in the latter case) accelerator chips available (and had found other ambitions for their SGI workstations and their next mainline instalment) they were able to make substantially cozier SNES games
Yeah, I meant more that the worldbuilding, characters, and plot all feel like they should be much bigger and more developed than the game has time for. I suppose it’s just Toriyama’s influence here.
The Dragon Quest games I’ve played don’t give me this feeling, it seems to me like their settings and characters are more comfortably videogamey.
I still feel like the first time you see The Future is a pretty good emotional beat. The Gang has just wrapped up their first narrative arc and are trying to get home from the past, high-fiving each other or whatever, but they accidentally go too far forward, and they step out into a devastated wasteland that is just recognizable enough as having once been their home, and that desolate, depressed world map music comes on, and you can just picture them standing there in shock, staring at the ruined landscape wordlessly.
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That moment is definitely a highlight, one of a few points of pure poetry in the game. Up there with “…but you’re still hungry” and “the future refused to change”.
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My favorite parts of Chrono Trigger are the attack on the monastery at the beginning and the attack on Magus’s Castle in the midgame. In both cases the game invests into setting up those situations as the important stakes. It does it not only by explaining why it matters, but also by concealing the wider stakes of the game story. So it avoids the feeling of “sidequest” and also prepares for a dramatic reveal/expansion of perspective moment. Calling this sort of storytelling “shonen” has some truth but there’s a well-honed craft in it.
The best point of comparison in earlier Square games is with FFIV I think. FFIV also has a Russian dolls of villains concept with the Baron followed by Zeromus. It loves sending the player unexpectedly to colorful adventurey places like the Moon, and it has a smattering of “tragic” story beats to create emotional range. The execution in FFIV is sketched-out compared to Chrono Trigger though.
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I did also appreciate the bit where your party inspects the crater where Lavos had landed and discovers a portal that warps them to a completely unexpected setting that seems to exist outside of the arc of this world’s history as they’ve been led to understand it. It turns out that thousands of years BEFORE the medieval time of 600AD there was a futuristic, technologically advanced society that was completely forgotten by successive civilizations. For a brief time it seems like an enlightened paradise, before you realize they’re using slave labor to build an enormous occult machine they’ll use to initiate the apocalypse in an effort to secure immortality. It’s a nifty series of twists.
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my main familiarity with most SNES RPGs games, esp the ones i never finished (Chrono Trigger and also like Seiken Densetsu 2/3), is heavily driven by listening to their OSTs a lot when i was like 15. those OSTs (esp if you throw the SNES DKC games in there too cuz why not) might have been the peak of music in mainstream games.
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