digimon story cyber sleuth is ok. it’s like an rpg from 1999 somehow got released in the modern day. EDEN especially looks like if the dreamcast had a 3d virtual chat room thing.
digimon designs are way cooler than pokemon designs, too, though i’m sure everyone already knew that.
i wish i looked like the protagonist lol
i much prefer the original pkmn designs to the original dgmn ones.
i dont have a good grasp on digimon designs after the initial tamagotchi style game, tho’.
never played a digimon in my life but that’s an extremely tempting sell.
their emphasis is much more heavily skewed towards monsters than pokemon’s animals and nature spirits.
for example, my current party is made up of a demon thing riding on top of an anthropomorphic clock, a bright red bootleg godzilla and a big muscular anthropomorphic dragon
all of these look like the logos of odd jeans brands I wore in the early 00s
adventure 01 designs were the best, imho.
old “gritty” digimon designs are my happy place
i watched a speedrun of cyber sleuth some time ago
at some point i had to make sure i hadn’t switched to a shin megami tensei speedrun
digimon is weird
i finished KING’S FIELD 2!! Theres a sizzle reel of the flashiest spells right before the credits. i appreciated that. Also that the final dungeon and boss arena looked like a VR mission, though the boss itself was easy and kinda disorienting.
This game’s excellent. It truly does remind me of the original Legend of Zelda and Metroid, by way of Doom. It has a similar appeal to those games, where the limited resources are used to maximum potential and the design is sometimes obtuse in a dated way, but totally interesting and good if you can overlook some frustrating parts.
scattered bits i liked a whole lot:
-Seath’s fountain. You come across this area early on, and discover it is the source of smaller fountains pouring into streams that you have seen in villages around Melanat. Most of the early game is spent finding dragon stones that power up this fountain and shortcuts that turn it into a central hub linking the two sides of the island. Once you can fill your flasks (which are their own cool economy!) with the strongest fountain water, you are greatly empowered and encounters that were once a lethal threat become a challenge you can surmount.
-the curve of your player character’s power in general is incredibly well done. Your starting location in the game has at least a half dozen things that will kill you instantly. By the endgame, you are hacking up demons with a magic sword that shoots lasers and you really FEEL that journey (on that note this game is very easy after about the 1/3 mark)
-the maps. you find 3 over the course of the game and each one has part of every area, more or less complete based on what the creator of the map would have known. That’s BRILLIANT.
-the keys and gates fast travel system. For the uninitiated, you get 3 keys and 3 gates (star, moon and sun). At each save point you can place any one of your keys and warp to it with the corresponding gate. it’s limited in a way that encourages smart use and the convenience feels earned, since you have to find each key and each gate and decide where to use them.
-the music is absolute fire
It also feels like a very replayable and speedrun-able game. Everything is either barred by stronger monsters or keys, so i could blow through it if i played it again just with the knowledge i have. A magic “build” is also more viable than you would think. Its just a very well-rounded and cool game, i think it deserves wider renown.
i also tried a little KING’S FIELD 3 but i can’t decide if i like it enough to keep playing it yet. it’s cool that there are item descriptions! It’s cool (and weird) that every character has multiple lines of legitimately well-written and evocative dialogue, and their own transcript page in your glossary that you may review whenever you like! It’s cool that the skybox is a terrifying red and black to make you feel like the kingdom is on the brink of armageddon. it is less cool that everything seems to be 10 miles apart on an ugly amateur doom.wad oh no
I found King’s Field 3 to be much less tight and inspired than 2. Certainly 2 has the best opening level theming in the series.
Try 1 if you haven’t; I enjoy the sparse, vanilla dungeon aesthetics the way I like well-drawn simple cartoon figures. It gets a lot of mileage out of skeletons!
as someone who felt very put off by (but morbidly fascinated by) the japanese original, this post is making me feel a lot of froth
i played the whole of harvey birdman attorney at law tonight and i liked it even though some of the humor is very…ten years ago
ended up doing the old adventure game thing of picking all the “wrong” dialogue choices to get all the jokes
this is honestly the first ace attorney game i have played, too? (unless ghost trick counts) and now i’m sure this genre would drive me crazy having already figured out the answer and trying to guess what specific path the designers want me to take there
I think that FMV game Contradiction handles it better by not having limited lives and having the challenge just be the sheer scale of stuff you have
all the street fighter stuff is real goofy too
I finished playing through the first Ace Attorney game the other week and, yeah, having to wrap your brain around their weird logic was a pain.
wow now i really want to play king’s field 2 and finish it this time. i started it twice but ended up giving up on it both times after hours of confused bumbling around and getting murdered by ants??? i think they were ants. but i keep coming back to it because i love the atmosphere of that game so much, and the soundtrack is crazy good too, and i’d love to see more of it.
I picked up King’s Field (PAL) super cheap in a flea market but playing it gave me motion sickness, anyone know if KF2 would be less nauseating or are the engines/head bob the same? And/or if emulation makes it a lil more palatable as regards away and motion sickness?
I decided to start Hotel Dusk Room 215 again last evening. It’s always stuck around in my head as a super impressive and cool game whose scope extends way beyond its means. I’m hoping it will keep some of the mystique alive during this playthrough eleven years on.
i’ve been playing a bit of shin megami tensei: ultimate survival devil survivor every other day for a while and… it’s pretty good? i like how focused everything is, and it’s pretty easy to follow even if you play it only intermittently. apparently if you want to see everything you have to do multiple playthroughs so that’s a good way of not turning the game into a classic jrpg slog. the combat is also pretty cool and encourages finding cool combos and demon combinations without forcing you to look for all the obscure shit.
it also has that good shin megami tensei dialogue i’ve come to know and love
the story is a bunch of concentrated demon apocalypse/conspiracy thing which i assume all the shin megami tensei games are about, it’s a good mixture of surprisingly interesting + stupid as hell
OK can i do a thing here OK i’m doing a thing
king’s field 2 vs 3 is a thought process extremely familiar to me. i have weighed these two against each other quite a bit, and i came out at the end believing that kf2 is absolutely the one that people should be foremost recommended to play and that most people would (and do) prefer, but that kf3 is actually probably the better game overall.
kf2 is a more surreal, less grounded experience. it feels like a adventurous whirlwind, a fantastical (if very subdued, somber, and obtuse) dungeon crawl. it’s a brilliant crawl, and it subverts that direction several times in favor of a broader scope, but at the core still resembles an expanded dungeon - a signifcant heightening (but not complete reinvention) of the format of kf1. kf3, on the other hand, takes great pains to situate you in an inhabited place, a place you could imagine yourself being. it populates the area with relevant NPCs who speak less cryptically and more coherently (to an extent). the atmosphere is bleaker and less forgiving, and any sense of wonder is rapidly traded for lingering dread. it’s more confusing, the maps are scarcer and less helpful, and the difficulty more insistent for a longer period of time. the areas are vast and inhospitable, but still convey solitude, still bear significant atmospheric weight.
kf3 should maybe only be played to completion if one thought kf2 didn’t take things far enough.
for me, kf2 felt shorter than it should have been. it didn’t quite deliver, for me, all of the promise of its premise and setting. the last third of the game, as you alluded to, is probably the weakest part. in retrospect, it’s by far the least memorable section (i can only really remember a fair bit of rather trivial combat and the final boss, which was pretty cool), and i found that the diminishing difficulty curve, while maybe fulfilling a power fantasy thing, was less compelling as i progressed.
kf3, by contrast, hinges on psychic discomfort and emotional challenge, which places a more consistent pressure on your actions. though the combat becomes easier (king’s field has never had much in the way of difficult combat), the dread remains palpable. this, plus the enormous, inscrutable, labyrinthine areas become the principal barrier to your progression in kf3.
maybe kf3 is the la mulana to kf2’s castlevania 3.
this is rambling and incoherent, sorry, i should think more
You’ve mentioned KF3 being your favorite KF so i’m glad you weighed in! i am interested in playing it a little further, but it’s been kind of a slog so far. It does not help that the game seems to run slightly slower than 2, the open environments are really pushing the engine.
@count_slackula There is an option in-game to enable/disable “walking motion” or some other weird wording like that which turns off the head bob. Maybe that would help?
@BustedAstromech i have played the first level of 1. i thought it was neat, but i had already tried 2 and felt like it was doing the same things but better, so i just watched a longplay of the rest.
@fotocopiadora you may have gotten to the termite’s nest. i remember that being a sort of tough early part. You should definitely try it again! if you do, pay close attention to the damage type your weapon has, it’s very important (much more so than it is in Souls). Like, those termites are especially weak to arrows and stab damage in general.
im surprised/happy that my KF2 post got such a response!! it’s good and everyone should play it
oh fyi after i get the shadow tower world record on console (i already have it, but it feels wrong having it on emulator), i will be running kf1-3 (probably 2 first), so maybe that will be of interest to you (!)
i will let people know here when this occurs. i almost have all the things i need to start…
