I’ve been putting off Ecclesia for ages. Recall hitting the first boss and just not having the patience for it back then.
I never really thought about it, but does the PS4/PSP version of Symphony have all the dialogue re-recorded, or just the cutscene stuff?
The way Robbie says “WHAT?!” if you try to transform back to human in a tight spot (at least in the original version) is extremely good and the kinda stuff that puts Symphony over the top.
Also ashamed to say that after 20+ years I realized that the demon familiar is a tiny winged knight holding a spear, and not some sort of goblin face with a massive underbite.
i played with JP voices for the PSP/4 version, because (from memory) i’m pretty sure everything in English was rerecorded and it just doesn’t have the same effect.
Yeah, that boss is more of a skill check than a “you must be this grindy to ride” gate, because IIRC there really isn’t much opportunity to grind before that point anyway.
Basically a “so you complained about how easy the bosses in past games were, eh? Now what, buddy?”
Ecclesia early game in NG+ hard mode is the real “get good” moment, to the point of masocore. What were they even thinking adding those flying skeletons in the forest
I was planning on writing this game up for my Puzzle Pavilion topic, but it was a tad bit too action-heavy for it, so instead this goes here.
This week I played through a puzzle platformer by the name of Trials of Azra. Its main gimmick is that you can possess any dead enemy (or non-enemy to be fair) and use their abilities to your advantage. If any of you happened to have played Space Station Silicon Valley it is a bit like that, except a bit more puzzle heavy and lacking the whole third dimension.
I’m not sure if this qualifies as programmer art, but it is pretty close.
So let’s get the negative bit out of the way first: the combat half of the game is very simplistic. You have a magic ball you can shoot at enemies for reasons and a few powered up shots that use up a mana meter, but overall it is about as basic as it could be. The boss battles are a bit better and have a neat deal where if you can use the environment to stun the boss your shots temporarily cause much more damage.
The real reason to play is the puzzle half of things, and this part is fairly well done. It features a bunch of standard elements such as switches to be flipped, pressure plates that need something to stand on them, lowered ceilings only smaller beings can get through and the like. That said the use of various different deceased creatures spices it up a good deal. To give a specific example, at one point I had to possess a corpse and lead it into an acid pit in order to dissolve it into a skeleton. That skeleton could then toss its bones upwards to take out a little flying devil with a bow, which could then be possessed in order to shoot an arrow across a large gap and break a crystal which resulted in the door forward opening. Some of the appeal there is technically just window dressing, but it works.
You can alternate between controlling yourself or your possessed minion with the press of a button (and if you have two controllers you can co-op play and have one player control the main guy while the other controls whatever is possessed). While one being is possessed the player character can choose to possess a second (which frees the first), and a possessed character can pass its possession on to a second dead being. This requires some care as it is possible to strand a body someplace where nothing else can reach it, forcing the player to restart the room. Also if a creature is killed while possessed its body respawns where it was first killed in order to avoid being too harsh, the balance being that the player character absorbs a similar amount of damage to its health bar when that occurs.
The thing that keeps the game from crossing over from “neat” into “very good” is the fact that the puzzle designs never get too puzzling. I think there were only one or two occasions when I was legit stuck for a bit trying to figure out what to do, most of the time it was generally at least fairly clear what the next move to make was. Still, neat is neat and I think at least a few people here would get a kick out of it. During Steam sales it seems to drop as low as 99 cents, and at that price if it sounds interesting I can’t think of a reason not to give it a try.
Aria of Sorrow is the only Castlevania I really like and I didn’t even finish it. Something about it just clicked with me whereas the other games didn’t. I guess it was the gamefeel. Haven’t played Ecclesia
While it always held interest I am glad I never actually bought Virtua Quest based on the hour I played just now. What a clunking, boring pile of whatever. Sega Blue Skies where I fight in a gray alley? or a dive bar? or a parking garage? Then I get summoned to a second level cyber-realm to fight Virtua Fighter Characters for their moves? Also I have a laser grappling hook. Yay!
Within an hour of logging into Nexus, I had received my hunter’s license we let me do…something. Then I got attack by a mysterious gang, got cryptic clues from a mysterious girl, got cryptic clues from a mysterious guy who said I’m not part of the war effort to take down the mysertious corporation trying to turn the Nexus into Chaos??
If you were with two friends and drunk/high this game would probably be hilarious.
it’s too bad the game sucks, but it’s amazing that ‘virtua fighter rpg’ was a concept that to sega somehow necessitated that much bizarre extraneous cyber-worldbuilding nonsense, instead of just being like… you are fighting in a tournament but then have to team up with the other fighters to fight the guy you gotta fight or whatever
it just perfectly encapsulates everything that is stupid and wonderful about sega around that era
Virtua fighter rpg for children that is also a amuro is stuck in the simulation/robot and his dad built the whole system but he knew nothing about it.
I also fought Shun Di and the voice was if you were doing a joke about how offensive chinese voices used to be but you knew you needed to back off because you aren’t racist.
it just amazes me to look at stuff like that and think, ‘they thought people would like this’
i want a ‘how did this get made’ style thing but for every decision sega made between 1999 and whenever the live action sonic the hedgehog movie was greenlit
