i think i’m nearing the end of Dragon Quest II. it’s hard to tell - it’s hard to tell how close you are to completing an RPG with no obvious narrative direction, no bosses, no cutscenes, etc. it’s actually super interesting because i feel like DQII is a strange in-between mutant, much more than i’d originally even considered.
you get the feeling of a larger jrpg, you get a party, you get a much-larger world, but it’s still pretty much “yeah, wander around and go look at stuff. see what you find out there”
i’m not sure i’d love this without consulting a walkthrough every so often for a hint on where to look, but yeah, the game has grown on me.
also, Firebane is just the “everything dies” spell right now, which has helped with time in battles.
I think arcade Double Dragon is still my favorite but I’ve been kind of off beat-em-ups in general lately so it had been so long since I’d played it that I’d forgotten that, although it doesn’t have fully directional attack buttons like DD2, it does IN AIR, so you gotta use kick when jumping left, and punch when jumping right. And I didn’t want to use elbow because that’s cheap. And I was still playing on the highest difficulty setting for some reason. So the first third of the play-through was an absolute mess! Then I gradually worked out the jump kick thing, but I kept doing dumb stuff like kiting the dudes in the speary section near the end into the two big dudes right before the final room, so it was an absolute mob in that hallway and I got murdered over and over in super-slowdown time. Somehow it was still fun though, there’s just that beefiness to the beat downs that works the magic.
I beat Ys 9. I think it fixed every issue Ys 8 had, besides the ones are core to the team system. I really hope 10 drops that system cuz it really limits how fun the game is and there’s always at least 1/3rd of the team members sucking. The fighting system just isn;t fun enough to last more than a few hours, and with the way they keep adding more story it just doesn;t work
oh my god The Quarry has maybe the most unintentionally funny use of licensed music possible for me: male vocalist folk cover of “Wise Up” by Aimee Mann i.e. the singalong from Magnolia
John Wick Hex was on sale so I picked it up and immediately bounced off the extremely tiny UI and complete lack of controller support, I get that this was done on a budget but wow, for a Unity-powered game which was on several consoles the idea of shipping it on PC with absolutely no controller mode is baffling to me
“Republique” is the worst name for a game because they took a word everyone knows how to spell and turned it into something nobody can spell. It doesn’t help that the studio name (Camoflaj) also follows the same convention
The Last Tinker: City of Colors looks like a mascot platformer but the platforming is basically automatic ala the parkour in Assassin’s Creed. Very bizarre combo. Also not terribly compelling in the opening bit and I don’t feel like hanging in, so this one gets scratched off the backlog.
Booted up Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Battle Nexus multiple times–the only time I seemed able to make the game check save files was at boot–to see if I still had my old save in which I had played through for five or so hours to get the hidden unlock for the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game, in which the original voice clips were all replaced by a generic “Cowabunga.” Did any of my PS2 memory cards have that old save?
Yeah, some friends and I played a local match of this last weekend thanks to its free PSplus availability. It’s so unpolished and broken. But we did play an all-garfield match on the garfield floating dream lasagna stage and that really was a hoot, I have to admit… But I never want to see that game again in my life.
I’ve been playing Sekiro Charmless. I have to get the Mortal Blade so that means Folding Screen Monkeys tomorrow and possibly Great Shinobi, Owl. My goal is to defeat Owl Father and get the Purification ending in this playthru.
