haven’t enjoyed any ys besides 1+2
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Oh absolutely not! Though I haven’t found any memorable character in any other Ys either.
The appeal in that game was in the blue skies exploration / fighting / going back to the base feedback loop, the plot mostly got in the way like Booj said.
I played it on Megahard or whatever to make the loop more meaningful and had a blast.
I actually wrote Sakuna off forever since your post about meat. That seemed worse than Ys 8’s bland anime tropes
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also did anyone but @Gate88 play this game, and can i add you as a friend on steam? i wanna find your weird items and characters and shit
I really liked this when I was younger so i’m curious to see if I still like it
I do remember it being too easy at the beginning but then my only real memory of this game was a long slog of a mission (in a good way) where the unit command stuff was pretty necessary and my own dynasty warriors battle contribution was vital as well - in games like this it usually goes too far one way or another
Couple of hours into Ys 9 and this sideplot about greedy lazy poor people taking advantage of handouts is just the worst.
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oh boy
I always planned to; pretty sure it’s still on my wishlist. Other things keep getting in the way.
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I wrote a guide on Heat Signature! “Heat Signature: A Comprehensive Guide” on Steam. One of my favorites. Check it out if you’re curious about some of the systems interactions.
The thing I love about Heat Sig is that it is actually tightly designed, wound like a watch. You are given perfect information and perfect control, so it’s up to you to make use of it intelligently. Each type of ship is its own individual puzzle, modified by your loadout and character attributes. Enemies follow deterministic behaviors you can exploit to your advantage. Every little detail is exposed and relevant to the mission.
Truly delightful game, I’ve been meaning to revisit it, especially since I need to update my guide.
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I’m interested in this take.
I think that the ships themselves, and how all the player’s gear/attributes interact with the ships, is super well-designed. I agree with you here.
I feel like the, uh, meta-design?? is not very thoughtful in a lot of ways. Like, early on I encountered a lot of missions I just literally did not have the available gear to deal with - armored enemies in particular. Perfect stealth is often impossible without stealth shields, which I also didn’t have. I ended up doing a lot of easy missions just to try and roll good gear. And the easy missions are deeply boring.
The game only really unlocked once I unlocked 10+ liberations, and my gear pool expanded significantly in the shops. But unless I missed something, the Liberations system is never explained and is just left to you figure out. I wasn’t aware that this was my only real way of unlocking new things permanently and leaving less to chance.
I guess that’s my other complaint, is that much is left unexplained in irritating ways? Like the ship that you can use to ram and destroy a room - it’s not explained at all how you use it (I guess you need to be at full speed which is basically untenable with any accuracy) so I just ended up blowing a whole run because my “dying” character ran out of time bouncing off of a ship repeatedly.
I’m fine with mystery (i love that you don’t know what subverting electronics will do until you witness it) but there’s enough little things like that which i find slightly annoying. Like, you can only find out that disabling the captain will also prevent alarms from a tooltip about Autopilot which tells you that you can’t do that on this mission. Lots of little things like that make this game really hard to break into.
Plus the loop tends to be very samey: get to your objective, then jump out of a window. It’s a good loop but I wish there was more, I guess.
I dunno, I keep coming back to “I feel like this game is weirdly slight, and I have to make sure I’m playing it in a specific way to have fun, but when I am having fun it rules”
this is definitely not a well organized piece of writing but i’m still trying to figure this game out lol
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I think my problem with it is that there’s a certain way to play it that’s very meticulous and low risk, and playing that way is sort of counter to how I initially enjoyed it. Stuff still surprises me in like Spelunky or most roguelikes, but once you understand the systems Heat Signature feels very rote.
I think it’s similar to how I feel about Into the Breach. I liked both games as I was learning the systems, but once I knew them it got boring really fast. I’d like both games a lot more if everything wasn’t perfectly calculable. Or if there were so many variables that calculating things was a fools errand cf. Tactical Nexus.
I like reactive tactical play much more than strategic play. Think this is also why I like playing collectible card games but HATE making decks beforehand.
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i couldn’t decide what to do tonight
so i played bloodlines
if you ever can’t decide what to do
play bloodlines
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There’s several creative ways to get around armored enemies. My personal favorite is to glitch trap them into space. That said, I went straight for armor-piercing blades to start precisely so I’d be able to handle them easy.
Perfect stealth is possible with nothing but teleporters, crashers, and cloners. I don’t think I personally used the stealth shield that much, even on ghost missions.
You can also go hijack a ship in-transit without doing a mission to look for gear. That’s actually how I geared up in the early game - accept a mission, find some other ship, hit it for stuff, then go to the next mission. The chests in random ships contain much better loot than the shop gear.
I honestly didn’t really get this feeling. If anything, Heat Signature feels like it’s all surface to me. What you see is what you get, often for the better, sometimes for the worse. Like, I understood the Liberation cycle pretty much right away, and item generation, and the general economy. It felt very intuitive to me. I can see how it might be confusing though.
I figured this one out pretty much immediately, because disabling the captain will prevent the ship from making it to a station, and alarms are the trigger to send a ship to a station (or speed it up if it’s already on the way). That’s why “autopilot” circumvents the alarm. I had some difficulty figuring out how to disable the pilot without offensive actions, but found out later you can glitch them out of the chair.
I definitely agree here, and I wish there was more variety. You basically just attack ships. It’d be nice to hit a station or something, some different targets. Heat Signature’s perfect information paradigm is also a bit of a drawback, because (as Gate88 points out) once you learn how the system slots together, that’s it. The rest is just rote practice.
Heat Signature’s greatest flaw is that it is TOO tightly wound. There’s not much in the way of rough edges to bump against. Everything is meticulous detailed and has its place in the system. That makes for an intriguing game for “designer puzzle brain” people, but it gets tired after the first dozen hours or so and you realize all that’s left is extremely minor variations on the same theme.
That said I had a really good time writing my guide and probing the edges of the game, so I love it forever.
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That meat discussion has stuck out more and more as a small misstep in a story with a lot of good. I wish it wasn’t there but also had to be reminded it exists.
It’s antithetical to the rest of the game’s themes and just feels like it got put in and forgotten about.
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I liked Ys VIII a lot (definitely not my favorite in the series) but I also have awful taste in stuff.
Discourse makes it impossible to search for Ys
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use quotes
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Looks like it works if you put it in quotes!
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went back and forth playing wizardry: proving grounds of the mad overlord on both the super famicom and the saturn.
good things about the saturn version:
- being able to call up an automap by pressing r
- can also use the retro art style for battles, in addition to the original wire-frame graphics
bad things about the saturn version:
- item/weapon/spell descriptions are the only thing not in english
- thieves don’t have the “ambush” ability in this version, which is something they use to become more useful in combat
good things about the super famicom version:
- does the opposite of the bad things in the saturn game
bad things about the super famicom version:
- doesn’t have the quality of life features or extras from the saturn game
- automap requires mp use
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Finished up the Easy campaign of Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders - it’s thankfully just 4 hours which is a perfect length for it. I was correct in thinking this whole campaign is kind of an extended tutorial / controls acclimatisation zone. The last mission was the first one that felt really complex and open, allowing you to freely pick 3 of 5 units in your control, but it was kind of a mess. I really wish popping open the minimap (the only non-disorienting way to issue large scale commands IMO) paused time or at least slowed it down by 1/2. Playing the strategy game here is still kind of weird and imprecise especially for things like cavalry. I’m starting to enjoy it more, but the comparison is like… if VMV2 is like playing a snake cube puzzle, KUF:TC feels more like plasticine.
I continue to think the game is very good looking, especially the missions that take place in the evening, I really love whatever effect I captured in the screenshot there - the armour texture getting manually tinted to match the surrounding sunset, reminding me of the two textures that Steiner had in FFIX to match his shiny armour reflecting indoors or outdoors.
Still don’t feel good about the characters in the first campaign, especially as they amp up the fantasy racism towards the last third. Funnily enough while the script is pretty rank the direction of most cutscenes has been really nice, with cinematography that evokes anything from Return of the King to Lancelot du Lac.
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