The night sequences in the Walpurgian forest and the handful of musical numbers are so confident for a relatively small studio. The styles they adopt are so varied and they just go for it.
There’s a sequence set in a mystical flooded underworld and there’s this beautiful ripple animation playing everywhere along with the mixed media that had it somewhere between Grasshopper and Vanillaware visually.
Early on you’re given shiny red shoes and asked to gather tender flesh, sweet nectar, and good company by the devil or Him (they’re actually referred to as this which kept reminding me of the Powerpuff girls). All for a wish-granting picnic with no strings attached. This sets up a day-night cycle that links together the strands of challenge nicely as you spend the day working to earn money to buy food but also needing to plan around dates and whatever the night dungeon will throw at you. I nearly got into some soft lock situations due to hunger reminding me I need to save money for the next morning to get breakfast rather than blow it all the day before on healing items. One time the need to go on a date led me to having to sell a bunch of shit just so I didn’t have to work or starve to death.
One issue is the night-time sections become very frustrating trial and error and the game is committed to manual saves as checkpoints so the pace can get killed during these segments very quickly as you test something out only to die and go back to a checkpoint that could be 3 minutes or 5 seconds away. This gets to extremes when the game stops progression to say ‘please save before venturing in’ on one boss fight. The visuals and music really carried me along since you get lavish stuff all the way through but every night is a new meat grinder.
The boss encounter you get the warning for takes the form of your sweetheart as a giant monster which was surely a lot of animation work for the team. Between phases you have to answer questions about them and you get instakilled for cliché romantic answers rather than acknowledging their own personal hopes and dreams beyond your relationship.
At the end of the game you give your gifts to the magical forest and I tried a last minute choice just before meeting Satan. What if we just didn’t cavort with Satan? And so we left. That turned out to lead me to a full good ending with my sweetheart. I simply refused to sacrifice my lover by walking into the burning tree. A bit anticlimactic given what I’d been doing all game but it painted a fairly extensive happily ever after which was nice. I went back to do the ending where you do sacrifice your beloved and it’s kinda just horrible and sad. There’s 10 endings and after looking them all up I realised I missed a secret plot path altogether to get one of them. Getting all the endings would take multiple full playthroughs which would take ages and would be very similar playthroughs as well
More people should try Little Goody Two Shoes despite the rough edges. A walkthrough makes it mostly very doable and it has a clear vision.
last night I realized I was making the Deist dungeon so much harder and scarier for myself because I didn’t just look at the map. I thought the closest route to a town with an Inn was the red line I drew here. But last night I learned I could just have traveled by the yellow one
is it me or do the animated cutscenes and some of the game parts seem to have some slight blur effect going on that makes it look a million times better than anything with similar art
Yeah you can never really make out crisp pixels outside of the deliberately ‘8bit’ minigames and I think it helps the mixture of sprites and hand-painted elements. It can sometimes look a little unpolished but works really well most of the time.
i bought Policenauts right after i played MGS1 back in 99. at the time, i couldn’t read or speak any Japanese at all, so i just sort of fiddled around with it and it seemed so cool
years later, the English patch was released for the PS1 version and i couldn’t believe how bad it was lol. just constant sexual harassment and also kind of a not really a good game?
i hear the PC-98 version is better in some ways, though
wait til you get to the dialogue about SO-CALLED WOMEN everyone calls “biovestites” because they got a sex change through gene therapy and the main character goes out of his way to talk about how disgusting they are
i played through the first few areas of castlevania order of ecclesia since i downloaded the compilation with the m2 haunted castle game… i think this one is pretty good. it has an actual difficulty curve which makes it stand out amongst the other games… this is like a delightfully mid series
It was great. Final boss fight was the first time I got a game over for a reason other than because I wasn’t paying attention, and I actually had to come up with a strategy.
I like it more than the 16-bit final fantasies. Better characters, by far. Plot was simple wuxia stuff but handled with enough finesse that it impressed. One of the main characters dies and it actually affected me, which is more than I can say for aerith.
Started on Sword and Fairy 6 and wow the series has changed in the intervening years. 6, in particular, is a strange combination of MMO interface and Final Fantasy XIII combat. Plot is a mess of proper nouns and unclear motivations, a stark contrast to the first game which slowly pulled you into the jianghu setting with great facility. Here, you are dropped into the middle of momentous events with unclear context.
Did you find the peach tree village? I did a replay recently and pretty sure i went there the first time but this time completely skipped it without realising. Didn’t know it was optional
6’s plot is pretty good once it gets going, although it’s definitely much more convoluted and confusing. The actual game is a bit of a janky mess, especially on PS4. It’s saving grace is the inverse difficulty curve so you can mostly cruise through it after the rough first few bosses.
7 is a much better game than 6 and probably only a bit longer than the first one if you skip sidequests. The plot in that one is pretty good too, although i think I liked it a bit less than the other two, and is more cultivation-brained.
The TV shows are kinda fun, not sure I’d necessarily say they’re good or well made though
I’m only a few hours into six, have only just left the starting town. I feel my experience with 6 is colored by how bad the translation is, probably the worst of any chinese rpg I’ve played (they translated Gods as Protoss and Beasts as Oak in the opening cinematic! I had to look at the synopsis on wikipedia to figure out what that cutscene was actually about)
Oh yeah it has every possible translation issue you can imagine: syntax errors, cut off text, completely wrong dialogue, untranslated text, no subtitles at all in the anime cutscenes.
The opening cinematic is especially bad and I don’t think even matches the rest of the game. Most of it is pretty much irrelevant until like 20 hours later when you’ve likely completely forgotten it though.
Yar Rising is a fun little platformer that just stubbornly refuses to be really good. The main character has baggy low rise jeans and a crop top like it’s the nu metal days again. The hacking minigame is little Yars Revenge scenarios and they would be very good if they were just presented for you to play and maybe get some sort of flow as you go through them instead of getting them one at a time to unlock doors. Honestly, the Recharged version of Yars is probably a better deal.
It’s loaded wth Atari nostalgia bait that occasionally works (the missile command levels) but mostly feels kinda wanky, like the amazing number of posters up on walls that you are never given a chance to look at closer. I’ve enjoyed it so far but cannot recommend. The Soundtrack fucking rules though.
edit: also meme-ish dialog that makes references to Hercules the legendary Journey, ATLA, and general Whedonishness.
