continuing my peg mission (finally). i coulda sworn i had already written about ff9 but i guess not??? anyway that means that i actually have quite a bit to cover:
final fantasy ix (psx on 3ds)
mannnnnnnn i would be down w faifan 9 if its pacing were a little different. the presentation is so good. it is fucking crazy how good this game looks. like literally nothing else on the psx looks like this it’s incredible. and the vibes are wonderful! each town and setpiece is such a treat to explore! i love dagger and vivi (peak character design) and the rat girl (peak character design)! monkeyboy is okay too but fsr he feels slightly too adolescent, in like, , , too real a way idk. anyway w/e the game presents really well, but it plays just sooooooo slowwwww. it’s wayyy too slow for such a simple battle system. like ff7 i think can get away with having a relatively simple set of systems because the plot is moving along at such a pace. but ff9 is taking its sweet time which means both the plot and the grind are keeping you in the same place. it’s exhausting!
i played for uhhh idk how many hours. a lot! i just checked hltb and it reckons the game is only like 40-50 hours long but for reasons i’ll get into i don’t trust that one bit.
anyway i should look into one of those “half the encounters double the xp” mods for this game or just accept that i don’t have infinite time and look at a longplay…
crimson shroud (threeds)
great name for a game i just don’t wanna play.
yasumi matsuno returns to deliver yet another game that’s real cool on paper but kinda laborious in practice. at first blush crim shrou has everything i want out of a jrpg: it’s short (7 hours!), has weird combat (turns out: not that weird), and weird presentation. however, i just found the opening hours so railroaded (and narratively uninspired) that i lost all interest. it felt less like an rpg and more like a choose-your-own-adventure. i didn’t feel like i was exploring in any sense; the spaces were limited and the systems even more so. i wish i’d written this earlier so that my impressions were less abstract and i could point to specifics but wcyd. i’d love to hear from someone who enjoyed this that it gets real good later on but i don’t see myself going back to check.
culdcept revolt (threeds again)
el em ay oh this ain’t a peg it’s a fuckn board game with terrible anime dialogue between battles.
cool game to tell your coworker that you’re playing but otherwise who cares man. u can’t trick me into playing board games by putting em on a handheld.
shin megami tensei: devil survivor: overclocked (only played 3ds pegs this time round huh)
speaking of c-grade anime dialogue! lmao. this game owns, but its plot and dialogue are fucking abysmal. like look man atlus games have never wowed me with their writing but at least the translations seemed like, , , competent. this time round i really felt like a lot of the dialogue was translated with no knowledge of its context; heaps of non sequiturs and awkward responses. i don’t think the writing would have been that much better if this hadn’t been the case but it made the whole thing feel particularly slapdash.
anyway i beat the heck outa this game – this is the first smt i’ve ever finished! mostly due to sunk cost fallacy. it took me a whopping 90 hours to complete! hltb told me it was only 50~ hours long! fucken, what’d i do wrong??? my suspicion is that i spent a unusually long time putting my team together and doing complicated demon ability inheritance bullshit; i definitely spent a long time just looking through available demons and working out how i could pass abilities up in the best way rather than “playing the game” (personally i would consider pondering the demon spreadsheets a nontrivial part of what it means to play smt but w/e). also i bet the clear times people enter are based on their save files rather than the system times (which would put me at 70-ish hours) which artificially shrinks the play-time but whatever who cares.
unfortunately i really don’t feel like i have a huge amount to say about this one. it had the right combat structure to really grab me (tactics without noodly equipment management bullshit), real nice graphics, and pretty slick pacing, despite the terrible writing. that’s all it takes i guess. that andspitedetermination.
the final fight is some bullshit boss-rush followed by a pokemon style “do you have a wide enough mix of abilities to target all the elemental weaknesses” gimmick which like, ok. not interesting but idk what i expected cos i’ve never seen the end of a smt before so maybe that’s normal; seems kinda lazy imo (another win for yokai watch 2).
biiiiiiiig shrug.
and that’s it for now! i’m definitely taking a break for a bit; smt really took the wind out of my sails, even tho i had a good time. but when i come back we’ll be in for some weirdo shit: i’m thinking either the last story, nepheshel, hybrid heaven, or koudelka. i’m leaning towards short, so probably nepheshel, but we’ll see…
