Spent a few hours tonight getting through the Lone Valley dungeon in Tales of Phantasia. I can’t tell if I love it or hate it.
Half the dungeon puts your party in a pseudo-poisoned state, where you take damage with every step with a floor of 1 HP. You can make this environmental state go away by pushing boulders into holes of the same shape and size some distance away. That in itself is reasonable and sounds easy on paper. The encounter rate is crazy high. Half the random encounter enemies can poison you, which stacks with the damage from the environmental effect. The item that repels random encounters below your level (Holy Bottle) doesn’t have a description that tells you what it does. About a third of the random encounters (after using the repel item) are Hell Summoners who are crazy strong and can summon demons that will deal 30-50% of your party members’ health In one hit. You can’t run away from those battles because the demon summon happens quicker than the speed your party members run away at. (The game script tells you to immediately run if you encounter one, seemingly not aware that that only works if they choose to normal attack you as their first move instead of summoning a demon.) You are constantly juggling your party members’ HP, TP, and status effects with items and healing spells, and it suddenly makes sense why this relatively small and dense dungeon has as many save points as it does. They clearly expect you to die a lot from trial and error as you figure out the optimal route between save points.
It felt intense and challenging in a way that most JRPG dungeons haven’t really felt for me, and I appreciate what it was trying to do but it felt like there was a bit too much bullshit to overcome at once. My main worry now is whether repelling those random encounters will mean I’m woefully underlevelled for what comes next. Guess I’ll find out tomorrow.
it is done. i’ve been playing a lot of classic vania lately and i had the urge to go back to the only non-iga igavania. doing my first 100% playthrough made me determine that circle of the moon is awful, grindy, unnecessarily vertical and the dss system is poorly integrated. doing four more playthroughs made me realize that it’s an incredibly fun speed game and no one should ever 100% it. probably true for most igavanias, really.
Just beat Banishing Racer, a Japan-only platformer for the Game Boy. Playing as a car, there’s a neat stop and go flow to moving horizontally, like a heavier handling of Mario’s walk/run acceleration shifting. On top of that you get a brief dash with plenty of follow through momentum to manage. It’s a bit sadistic at times (screens tightly packed with enemies and sometimes deceptive hit box/player collision (watch the wheels for landing on platforms, not the significant overhang of the car’s bumper/fender!)) but it’s not terribly difficult and takes about an hour to beat. Cute stuff. I want more automobile platformers.
I got a few recommendations, including from @BustedAstromech and I really like Wildermyth – it’s a tactics game with a map layer, like a fantasy XCom, and it’s built to be extensible, though the campaigns it comes with are quite charming. they’re doing some amount of procgen for the battles and they often produce some pretty endearing results, like “two of your party members stayed up all night and now they have a negative modifier to dodging but they can rig traps up on the map”
this genre that I love so much is pretty oversaturated at the moment and the difficulty is cranking up very, very slowly, so I don’t think I’m going to put much more time into it until it’s farther along in development, but these folks know what they’re doing – it’s a nice contrast to pendragon, which I found fairly overdesigned
The Messenger is a really cool Ninja Gaiden inspired game with a powerful, flexible toolkit and a nice tight feel. Good 8-bit style graphics and bangin music. I was legitimately surprised and delighted by the first big twist, which is you time travel into the future which is represented by - the game turning 16 bit!. The problem is the second big twist, which is after finishing a nice tight linear platforming action game, it opens up into a Metroidvania and you revisit earlier areas to find secrets. While cool in theory, I am just not up for that kind of fiddly crap and was instantly deflated. That’s ok though, I got what I wanted out of the game and can delete it now (although I’d really love to find if there was a third format-breaking twist).
I like the stuff Ghost of Tsushima tries to do in sort of, y’know, minimizing open world game HUD bloat. Your life bar and meter only show up during combat, you’ve got the wind blowing occasionally toward your pinpointed destination, and when that works, it’s pretty cool.
What happens more often is that you see some bandits en route to your destination hiding in some grass, so you slow time and pop them each with an arrow to the head, which is a “Ghost” action so suddenly day time turns to stormy night and fucks up your visibility, as a yellow bird constantly tries to drag you in one direction and a fox yelps for you to run another, and then the wind may or may not account for verticality so you’re running around what should be the destination, but no it’s under the cliff you’re on, and you know better than to follow the bird because it’s just gonna lead you to another dorky headband at worst or A Cool Hat at best.
Admittedly! When it does work it’s really nice. When it doesn’t, it’s like three of these sketches playing simultaneously.
Played a little bit of that Mechanicus game. Given the recent glut of Warhammer games I went in slightly skeptical but I think after I spend more time with it I’ll place it in the same tier of quality as the Vermintide/Space Marine.
I’ll be honest though, I don’t know anything about Warhammer. I’ve always thought it looked cool from afar but for whatever reason it never floated into my orbit. Mechanicus is certainly budget in comparison to its competition but it finds interesting ways to overcome, as is usually the case (limitation fosters creativity!).
I obviously can’t go into great detail considering I just started but I would say any comparison to XCOM doesn’t make sense to me. For one, there is no cover system. For another, you don’t have a set amount of actions per player. You have an overall pool of action points you can use to disperse among your team as you see fit. There are plenty of ways to gather you action points by either interacting with the environment or sacrificing low level characters, and etc. On any given turn you’re considering efficient ways to rack up additional action points and obviously taking on enemies.
In my few brief battles it was surprisingly complex, so I look forward to seeing how it evolves throughout the campaign. Has anyone else played this? Anything else I should know before I get deeper into the game?
played a ton of bloodlines the last few days, got a no death expert clear tonight so maybe time to move on…
managed to get saturn emulation configured properly - i was getting fps dips and crackling audio but with gpu hard sync at 1 it’s fine and i can start panzer dragoon saga
Grounded is awesome! It’s like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: The Game. Also while it’s a typical survival crafting game you actually play as one of four specific characters and there’s a story to it and the world itself isn’t randomly generated but hand-crafted and it’s just awesome. Everyone should play it!
some final thoughts on Doom Eternal more concrete than “I liek shootbang and hate jump”: I think it’s a worse FPS/shooter/Doom revival than Doom 2016 but at the same time think it’s probably the best Western made character action game and I think a lot of that comes down to the game feeling too designed. everything has a place and a function and that’s great, it’s cool that the whole arsenal gets use but it comes off as a bit sterile. the levels and arenas kind of do the same where they’re very clearly working well for the enemies they’re throwing at you but they feel too created and less organic (or: boy, those demons sure do love monkey bars). also by the end, you maybe have one too many buttons. I like the shoot/chainsaw/punch/grenade loop and adding BFG and BFG But Sword dilutes the purity of that
mostly I’m angry that the whole game isn’t explicitly designed for me to run around with the super shotgun and and just keep dashing around and swinging off imps like a fucking moron
also I’m playing SoR4 again for some reason and just laughing to myself about how neutral jumping renders you invulnerable. one day I will get drunk enough to clear mania with Max
yeah, IV and V are super mixed-bag experiences. IV has some really good music in it, though. i felt like V has weird balancing issues/particularly unfair platforming scenarios that they attempt to make up for by having enemies drop 1-Ups almost constantly.
VI is where things get a little more interesting? still, though, i think 1 - 3 is best bang for your Mega buck
Still playing Minecraft Dungeons. The game has gotten significantly harder in the second difficulty. Gotta really dig for the weird, interesting synergies.
I’m finding that there’s just enough variety that I can’t try to find the same synergy with higher levels all the time. So I end up sticking with a cool combo for a long time (a crossbow that shoots 5-15 ricocheting arrows, an artifact that will let me turn all of those arrows into exploding rockets once every 20 seconds, and a scythe that heals me every time i kill anyone), but having to replace that entire combo in one fell swoop with something, like, 10 levels higher.
One of the neat things is that most weapon enchantments trigger on either (a) a percentage of hits, or (b) every X hits. That means that an enchantment that sucks on a slow weapon could be incredible on a really fast one. Currently working with Fists That Punch Really Really Fast, but added enchantments for these big shockwaves that get sent out every 5 punches, and a 30% chance to make a poisonous gas cloud with every hit. Also using an artifact that, like, doubles my hitting speed so I’m doing ridiculous amounts of damage for 10 seconds at a time.
Some of the enchantment interactions are really surprising too. So the crossbow I mentioned above would naturally shoot 5 arrows. But I added an enchantment that would also shoot 5 arrows like, 20% of the time. BUT, this had a chance to trigger with all 5 naturally shot arrows, up to twice, so you could get a total of 15 arrows in one shot, and were almost guaranteed to get 10. And then any other effect that could be triggered by arrows would also be multiplied that many times, hence shooting 5-15 incredibly damaging rockets in one shot instead of just the one. Good shit.
Anyway, will probably beat difficulty 2 this week, then move on to difficulty 3. I’m experimenting with a crossbow that shoots exploding bolts - trying to figure out if adding piercing will mean that it will pierce multiple enemies, causing an explosion each time. I do know that piercing synergizes with another enchantment that can shoot 5 arrows out when it hits - you can pierce through 5 enemies, and like 3 of them will shoot out 5 more piercing arrows, each with a chance to cause another chain reaction of piercing arrows. It’s stupid and it rules.
