I actually beat Wuppo! I think it was on the recommendation of someone here… I thought it was, like, the best indie paper mario I’d seen, in significant part because it wasn’t signalling too strongly that it wanted to be paper mario.
I also like when an engine like that only gradually telegraphs how it’s going to be used over the course of the game… I think it maintains a very satisfying ambiguity as to whether it’s more of a platformer or an adventure game or an RPG almost the whole way through
Oh yeah that’s why my previous attempts to play this failed. The game is filled with tedious walking back and forth across the stage. You gotta attrition your health. Interesting it has 3 save slots and your save starts you at the beginning of the room you saved in. It almost functions as quick save/load on the Sega CD.
I am playing the Japanese version which is more balanced supposedly but I spent 90 minutes in a cave and eventually got a walkthrough open and the answer was that tedious. Talk to the monster on the left side of the stage, platforn/attack to the right. Talk to the human trapped in a cave. Walk back to the left. Walk back to the right. Walk to the left, now you can continue. To the next stage where you do this all over again then have to eventually come back to this first stage to continue…to the left.
Joke was on me. “Once I get out of this cave it has to get better right?” “No. There is More Cave!”
Continues my theory that Falcom songs are okay, but are all 1 minute long and start to drive you crazy at 20 minutes. Now I am rethinking of my plan to replay Ys Book 1 and 2. Now maybe there is a game to play while listening to other things. Maybe the 500 Falcom albums on streaming services.
Yeah I think this was me! I loved Wuppo. I saw it as an Itoi-like but I guess the Paper Mario comparison is more apt!
I’ve continued playing Persona 5 Royal and all my interest evaporated when I maxed out my last confidant.
As I went through the game I’ve slowly raised the % of text I skip to like… 95%, and I couldn’t possibly go back to 0% in the brand new third semester, I would die of boredom. So I might as well give up now.
Watching all confidant stories unfold in the exact same way with the same music at a mega sped up speed was hysterical though
The challenge I tried (hard mode with 3 party members only) was great at times though really, past the very beginning only a few rare enemies + bosses are interesting in this game, and they’re few and far between. Special mention to Haru’s dad who became a Matador-like roadblock in Royal and took me hours of tweaking and retrying to get past
I’ve tried FFType 0 HD which is definitely both the Final Fantasy I wanted as a kid AND a PSP game on your megalarge TV. The camera and blur effects are headache inducing and there’s unprecedented jank going on with that battle system but I still prefer it to FF15/FF7R TBH. After the first intro mission we immediately get all 14 playable characters and they all play very differently and they’re all named after cards (like… ace to nine, and jack/queen/king) and they’re all one-dimensional. Barely comprehensible story and pages upon pages of lore in the menus. Also Cid built and unleashed a nuclear bomb in this one
Played a little bit of Phantom Crash. This game is so fucking good and I have only played one session. The writing is really funny, the menus all look fantastic, the mech gameplay is pretty good. It’s fast and kind of weird, but I like it a lot.
Finished up Technobabylon which both went exactly where I thought it was going to but still managed a few surprises. I guess the other warning I should give anyone who might play this is that a lot of the plotline revolves around the fate of some frozen embryos which maybe would be upsetting to someone depending on their circumstances. Certainly hits a little differently for me than it would have last year. There’s two endings and, at least the one I got, goes to a fairly dark place. I think it’s a shame that one of the main characters kind of just gets dragged along at the end. She’s part of the Big Reveal and all but ultimately she doesn’t seem to have that much agency in the proceedings which kinda sucks. And then she becomes a cop lol.
today i went to the arcade with a friend and played iidx. i am still very rusty and still uncertain if i want to invest the time to come out of retirement. in this weird zone where i can AA most 10s on random/on a sightread but 11s are generally too dense for me. tried bistrover 9dan and failed out of the third song. i also played a bit of ddr – nothing serious, some 10s-13s with no scores worth talking about, but it was fun to move around a little bit. finding myself surprised with some of the step charts even as far back as 1st mix. they trip me up! can’t figure out how i should move my body to avoid double-stepping!
went back to my place with my friend and we’ve been on a big tekken kick lately so we play a bunch of tekken 3 when he’s over here and tekken 7 when i’m over at his. i fried up some scallion + turnip pancakes for us and some tofu on the side and we took turns trying to beat the arcade mode so we could unlock more characters. the first character to be unlocked was kuma, the big bear. i hadn’t been able to beat arcade mode without continuing with anyone else but i made it through first time using kuma. my bear affinity paid off! same kinda thing happened last year when i tried playing online with kuma in tekken 7 – got a streak of 10 wins in a row despite having never played the game before.
bidding on a copy of tekken 5 rn as i remember liking that one as a kid and i’d like to revisit it. we’re also talking about getting cheap hori arcade sticks…
neither of us are very good at fighting games btw! but we’re around the same skill level so it’s fun to fuck around in them together
Backlogged Trek to Yomi in the end and start to play Gibbon, truly enjoyable. I really wanna give Gibbon a 10/10 if they don’t put human inside (even I know they made this game for protect nature). The game has same speed feeling like OlliOlli2, smooth and relaxing swing through the forest.
Anyway, I love Gibbon, I will watch them swing on youtube now.
I played 2 levels of Otogi yesterday and it did not sate my hunger for Japanese Xbox originals. It feels really bare and I can’t tell if it’s going to get any more interesting. Maybe I should’ve watched more videos or read about it instead of just grasping for vibes.
Popful Mail continues do everything thrice. It is very linear half decent action/platformer but you have to cross over every environment multiple times. I am now on an ice world, so legit excited to see how that bullshit works out.
That it is a fully voiced anime with jokes and reactions that you can play goes a long way in 1993 terms. Drawing lines between this and Monster World 4. Charming but a chore to actually play and failure only makes you think “this wasn’t fun, at all, the first time.”
Look I can’t just move on to Alundra. That would be rewarding and fun. I would have a great time.
I did play Popful Mail to this album tonight and that was pretty great to grind out to (the grinding is painless, needed, and relatively quick in the Japanese version).
Maybe I’ll play Vay. A game no one has ever mentioned outside myself because it inexplicably got an iOS port 10 years ago.
