1000xResist : This game is a nice try, I was fascinated for the first half, the setting is rich, it has nice environments and shots for its budget and does a few neat tricks. Very good attempt at pseudo-anime teen angst world end drama we all know and love.
I feel the latter half really lost momentum. My issues were switching main characters (which is a very cool move that never really works in practice… people only remember the first half of Lost Highway…), and the way events happening during the game’s present were always less interesting than unraveling events from the distant past. Plus the characters started to get real quippy.
And let’s be honest I’m too old for this teenager shit now… have to admit it. Happy for all the people that cried multiple times playing this though
I think this is actually false in every SaGa, as avoiding too many enemies will make bosses too powerful compared to the party. You should find a nice balance between fighting 0 enemies and all the enemies
My guess is this sentiment comes from people wanting to see all the quests at once in RSMS + people panicking at enemy formations becoming suddenly super tough all of a sudden
so yeah, the English title is just the non-evocative “Wardner” while the Japanese title is a more-fantasy-appropriate title of “Forest of Wardner.” idk, i guess in the 80s some fantasy stuff did just have a single name - “Conan” comes to mind. but even then, it’s like…“Conan: The Something”
the game does something pretty clever on Stage 2. aside from having the hardest “duck underneath some blades on a conveyor belt” section i’ve ever played, the boss of Stage 2, at first, is a small dragon, like in Stage 1. you think to yourself, “oh, okay old game - the developers were lazy and every boss will be this dumb dragon.”
so you kill the dragon, and then the gate opens where the princess is trapped, and so you walk up to her, but
oops, she has a hurt box and i died
replay. wait. the princess comes out and slowly transforms into a giant spider. real Stage 2 boss, fight.
Taking your advice, I just played this! It’s really delightful!! I love how accomodating it is to just bumbling around its levels. Not overly thinky when it comes to its puzzles because you kinda inadvertently stumble upon things as you move around and switch between abilities. Love how cluttered and windy the levels feel and how you can find yourself wrapping back around to an earlier section. I like as well that they aren’t just simple “puzzle rooms”, they actually manage to establish a really interesting sense of place… The little characters that you can chat to help this too. More games should let you play as a babushka. This one’s going on the wishlist!
another thing i appreciated about this game (that i assume this nextfest demo is long enough to show but i wouldnt know with certainty) is what an enterprising freak can do with enough dedication, specifically smuggling in the wrong abilities by dodging the mist meant to clear them. i snuck in the wrong powerups, explored with them to find a secret trove, solved a puzzle that required them and was rewarded with now becoming a seaman in the water
Can confirm the hidden seaman ability is in the demo It was a really nice feeling getting that and immediately thinking of all the places I could go back to and try using it. Ended up playing way passed the explicit endpoint for the demo just cuz there was so much to find!
Rsms is not for people who want to see every quest in a single playthrough. Just play it casually and trust that the game is balanced for that playstyle (because it legitimately is) you’ll see some quests and miss others. Make different choices when you play different characters. You’ll see everything eventually. Don’t worry about being optimal. Just don’t grind and you’ll be fine.
Yeah I am not really too concerned about seeing all the quests, since unless I want to painstakingly scour the guides I am bound to miss out on a bunch of them. Plus seeing everything on one playthrough would be bad considering they want you to replay with the other characters. More games should force you to miss out on stuff, completionism is the devil.
If anything, the ER counter contributes to a feeling of impending doom which is kinda cool.
I think the enemy scaling isn’t too scary either since the usual SaGa difficulty curve is such that it usually starts easy, ramps up quickly, gets overwhelming for a while but then the enemy level plateaus while you still get stronger. The main gripe I have is that there’s often so many enemies packed into small places that it gets exhausting trying to get through without 10 battles in a row.
Anyway, I think Minstrel Song is probably one of the more engaging JRPGs I’ve played for a while. Especially compared to the last one I did, Baten Kaitos which I ended up completing more as a personal obligation to 20 years ago me.
Emerald Beyond probably has one of the best battles systems ever, but everything else felt a bit bland and I had to sort of push myself to finish third playthrough (still haven’t done the last two characters)
I beat Tactical Breach Wizards today. I enjoyed the, I dunno, 20 hours I played but I found it to be wearing pretty thin as it went on both story and game wise. The story got less interesting as it got bigger and started to reveal more, it became a less jingoistic Tom Clancy novel and the fantastic elements got turned into a technology instead of getting weird. The later enemies were just kind of cheap “now we get to break the rules (and favor certain character builds)”. I had been thinking of it more of a puzzle game than a tactics game with the unlimited rewinds/deterministic rules but then the foundations of the puzzle got sabotaged in a cheap way. Enemies started to be able to act at the start of their turn as well as the end and more than once I had to restart a level because an objective was locked out between turns with no warning. I don’t regret my $20 but I’m not going back for any of the side content.
Tried the Glitch Dungeon Crystal demo as well and explored it a good bit (albeit not enough to find that extra hidden ability apparently) and it seems like it could be a good one, d-pad controls were sadly rather iffy via Steam input which was a downer (mentioned it on the game’s forum, dev says they’ll look into it). I think the original was a tighter experience but it was also maybe 15 minutes long, did add it to the wishlist.
I feel like I’ve misunderstood Alan Wake all this time as I’m midway through episode 3 now and I have no idea why I saved this for spooky season at all, it isn’t scary in the least. My main feeling is that it is basically trying to be midway between a survival horror game and an action shooter, which has left it in this rough middle ground where it kinda got the worst of both worlds (not as scary/tense as the former with much less interesting gunplay than the latter). Fortunately I’ve managed to not run out of ammo yet so they at least balanced that part right but as my first Remedy game… not really wowed at all. The 15 or so minutes of Quantum Break I played to see if my PC could run it were more impressive IMO.
I liked the fact that a lot of the weapons in the OG Alan Wake have low rates of fire/slow reload. Revolvers, bolt action rifles, shotguns, etc. That plus the flashlight mechanic I thought added some tension even against the basic enemies. It does get a little rote after a while though.
I played the first hour or so of the Metaphor: ReFantazio demo. It’s solid! I’m probably gonna end up buying this game… and then playing 20 hours and shelving it, god help my soul. But I bet those’ll be a fun 20 hours!
I really liked this shitty drill instructor guy. This bit of writing had more flavor than I’m used to for an Atlus game:
A guy I roomed with in college once told me that when he was a kid he used to secretly stand in front of the bathroom mirror and mess his hair up to look like this guy’s hair. He called the style “The Eagle”.
I’ve been continuing to work my way through the final fantasy pixel cremasters, up to 5 right now. I was really looking forward to replaying this but I’m kind of having choice paralysis with all the job combination possibilities. My first time around I did things pretty by the books and wanted to do something more creative, but I feel like the early game doesn’t really reward or encourage creating interesting combos of abilities, seems kind of like a grinder’s delight more than something that feels immediately malleable to different strategies and playing styles.
I have heard later games in the series bring the job system back but I don’t know anything about ffs after ten. Is this another one of those things where you’re all going to simultaneously yell at me about how good 14 is?
Any way I think playing 20 minutes of a classic jrpg every two or three days is about as much video games as I can handle. But I love it! I’m old as dirt I don’t need to try new things. I beat blood borne I have nothing left to prove as a gamer. I’m so stoked to play ff6 again, revisiting the old ones in sequence has only made it clearer to me what a piece of work that game is.
Part of me wants to keep going and do the psx ones next, then jump back into dragon quest for awhile, or maybe play chrono trigger for the nth time and then finally try chrono cross
If they don’t do something magical for the chrono trigger 30 year anniversary next year I’ll probably cry.
It was a really nice feeling getting that and immediately thinking of all the places I could go back to and try using it. Ended up playing way passed the explicit endpoint for the demo just cuz there was so much to find!
