Games You Played Today Oratorio Tangram

Yeah, it’s a little much. The races aren’t that important though: it’s not necessary to have all of them, particularly as most of the racial skills are actually shared but just obtained at different levels. I couldn’t fit in a Celestrian but it really didn’t matter.

The main thing to watch out for is don’t put more than one summoner type in your party, since the global summon limit of 3 is a very strong antisynergy. Beyond that just use common sense and give up hope of minmaxing on your first run. You can always respec later by paying a few levels.

this post links back to the last post about castlevania: symphony of the night i made. you can click the top right link that says “GRIMGLAMFIRE” with my face covered by a skeleton mask: if you want. you don’t have to (and there are a lot of obvious reasons lately you shouldn’t)

i was originally gonna make a thread but i decided the last thing anyone needs is more Fucking Words about castlevania symphony of the night. this is my vain attempt to look like i’m hiding something away - and also my way of ensuring at least a little bit of the people here might read it!

here’s my relationship with videogames. maybe you could gleam it from the last post: but they often exist as things i am interested in as works of artistic fervor that i neither have the time nor patience to ever fully devote myself to. here are a smattering of games i have ever fully devoted myself to. a list i’ve never told anyone, that leaves me always feeling like a half-assed piece of shit who doesn’t really love videogames:

ff12, ff7, neverwinter nights, champions online, parasite eve I & II, bloodborne & dark souls III, metroid prime, super metroid, castlevania: symphony of the night, metal gear solid (all of them, sorry) folklore, resident evil 5, megaman zero 2, mortal kombat 9.

castlevania: symphony of the night is definitely in that list above if you look hard enough: and for good reason

(second point: all of the warp room icons thematically relate to the area they’re in)

it’s a really weird game that is overstuffed with small details. you can sit in chairs. the castle is one of the best realized areas in a videogame with many major and subtle architectural touches long enough that diplo has written about them a lot.

but anyway. konami wanted their staff to focus on developing castlevania 64.

reinhardt schneiders outing was meant to be the Primo Castlevania-o at the time and the team iga worked with (and under another director) was basically given free reign to do whatever

and they did!

castlevania symphony of the night is a special weird game, because it’s weird and it works

6 Likes

who wears trance mode the best

Kuja

Zidane

Terra

terra always makes me laugh

5 Likes

oh man these did not survive the transition to AAA

(Kuja wins imo)

3 Likes

I think Kuja looks fine because he some something more going on with his design with his shredded clothes and the feathers on his head. Zidane is just barren and boring, and Terra’s fur just does not mesh with her body well. Maybe that’s good though, because she’s a monster or something anyway. It gives her an inhuman look.

playing legend of grimrock for the first time despite owning it since release

it has me thinking about the megacd eye of the beholder with koshiro tunes

4 Likes

I just saw some gameplay and I had no idea Grimrock was basically trying to be this game. It looks really cool

Eye of the Beholder 2 is still very playable and entertaining, especially its first half. I played it ~3 years ago for the first time and had a good time. The only thing to keep in mind is that you’re expected to save scum

3 Likes

Grimrock is specifically trying to be Dungeon Master, which both of the Eye of the Beholder games were imitating as well.

Needless to say, dungeon master is basically perfect in the subgenre of real time dungeon crawler and everything else has been a step back in terms of design

1 Like

realtime dungeon crawlers have fun puzzles but the combat has never made any meaningful steps forward

2 Likes

i have played the minesweeper minigame in shiren 5 so much i have reverse engineered how it generates the maps, to make randomness less random.

so if you’ve never played it, the idea is that there are five floors, each randomly generated with bombs. you can hit a wall in any of the four cardinal directions from any open tile to open it up, and get a number indicating how many bombs are on neighboring tiles. you can’t move diagonally.

there are some resources that let you recover from making mistakes, or to figure out things without having to guess. the goal is to get to the stairs at the end while using a minimum of resources to do so.

through playing a lot, i’ve also determined: there is always a valid orthogonal path to the stairs, and there will always be at least 2 open tiles neighboring any bomb. (that is, you will never see a number higher than 6) this means that, if you know there is an open tile on an edge surrounded by bombs on two sides, the third side will always be open, guaranteed.

but what’s really going on is that it’s running a conventional maze generation algorithm over the entire map, using a 2x2 grid, and then pruning bombs afterwards. that is, every 2x2 group of tiles is a single maze tile, and every single one always has at least one open tile. this means stuff like…

..XX..
.XXXX.
.XXXX.
..XX..

is possible, but

...XX.
..XXXX
..XXXX
...XX.

is not, because it’s offset a tile.

to put this together: every 2x2 maze chunk has at least one open map tile, which opens orthogonally to at least two other open tiles (or the map edge). and it is possible for a human to derive the open spaces from this.

i think i have a problem.

10 Likes

ace of seafood is aggressively bizarre

2 Likes

I can’t beat the hardest level of those for the life of me. Unrelated to that mode, I love Shiren with a passion but it’s mainly for the original game. It’s such a shame that the actual “start with nothing/level 1 dungeons” are relegated to the postgame in the Wii and Vita sequels. I hate that the main story dungeons in both are built around grinding up item levels through insurance and Oh Shit Button revival herbs, takes so much of the thinking on your feet accomplishment out of beating the game.

I can beat Shiren 5 story dungeon consistently without revival grass or grinding at all, so uh… Disagree!

The minesweeper dungeon is hella random and sometimes you just have to guess, but I’ve been applying my CS knowledge to try to make it less randomized.

Well that’s good to know at least, to me it felt like those later levels of the tower spiked huge in how much damage enemies could take/dish out in a way the original never did.

I think you forgot how much Dragons hurt in the original then! Because ow!

The real keys are:

  • aiming for the dotanuki or beast weapon/shield pair for double bracelets. dotanuki has more damage, beast has more def, neither matters in the long haul. this is mostly for not having protection from sleep/confuse bracelets not be a pain to equip.
  • spending a little time farming arrows from the traps the robot dudes leave in the first tower(particularly poison, for the slowing effect)
  • keeping an eye towards fusion items(particularly bonus damage vs Water/Drain/Dragon/Flying and protection from fire)
  • keeping an eye out for the Monster Detector bracelet, it’s always 5000 and i find one in a store 95% of the time, makes nighttime a breeze
  • speaking of nighttime, the very easily accessible skill that gives you a self-healing buff lasts for the entire floor once used so it’s incredibly useful
  • if you find any staffs of slowing, save them for the bosses
  • letting shovel birds in the third tower fill up junk pots(for Speed-up grass! for the bosses and emergencies. also nets revivals. speedup on you + slowdown on the boss gives you four turns to its one!)
  • keeping an eye out for the Entou/Pitching/Longtoss/whatever bracelet (because it breaks boss resistance)
  • stockpiling some anti-mage items(blessed normal peaches, protection scrolls, etc) for when you get past Sparrow Town.

I play the JP ver so I don’t remember the EN names well.

2 Likes

i think the coolest unique thing the original Shiren did was having one large dungeon that split off into optional ones, and unlocking more items/sidequests as you did the loop over and over. All the mystery dungeons ive played since split the story up into a series of discrete dungeons, which loses a little something. The original feels like a real journey.

Also yeah the trials (final floors) in the original game are fucking rough, though by that point you should be pumping your sandals straight for the exit

i need to buy another copy of the DS version, i lost mine years ago and it’s been too long

3 Likes

I wish they’d localized it earlier, a lot of Chunsoft stuff that trickled out in the US in the late 90s (like Chocobo’s Dungeon 2) wasn’t nearly as good

1 Like

Cool game. Fully-charged axe hit: satisfying.

Also, did you know that Ryu Hayabusa has a Sunsoft NES Batman Walljump in the Master System version of Ninja Gaiden?

3 Likes

Good tips!