Oh yeah, I wasn’t trying to criticize you or anyone on how much of a game they want to play. I just wanted to let you know that those special puzzles literally gate nothing. You can see all the endings and anything that Broco spoilered just by playing the normal puzzles (EDIT: didn’t recall correctly; there’s ONE specific special puzzle you need to do to see the secret ending). Those special puzzles weren’t really my jam either; I found them rather tedious and only did a couple.
pokemon yellow, really bummed kabutops can’t learn rock slide (or any rock moves for that matter)
So Danganronpa V3’s finale is one of my favorite moments in games this year. Just a complete self-immolation in order to Make A Point – a series which spent three games on constantly ramping up the absurd realizes there’s nowhere left to go and that any lessons it can give to the players will ring completely hollow due to sequelization, so it accepts the fate of having ran its course and spectacularly destroys itself from the inside while one of the characters is screaming about THE MERCHANDISE. Ballsy as hell, kinda hoping there will be no MGS4 to its MGS2.
Also, aside from some pacing problems (that the game realizes and pokes fun at which doesn’t really help) and crappy one-off scenes the writing is surprisingly fun – the cases are complex and slyly break or allude to the established rules of mystery genre, and the characters have gone far from the (literal?) cardboard cutouts from D1. Which is especially visible in cute bonus modes where V3 students clash with earlier casts.
Bonus points for using weird gameplay shifts like crappy masocore platformer stage or Outrun-inspired minigame to display the various facets of characters’ trains of thought or emotional states. I give it 9/10 Rave Ons.
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I wasn’t really interested in More Danganronpa after the second game, which had a lot of fun playing with player expectations (and their complicity in events) but I’ve heard just enough bits like this about V3 to get me to pick it up. I’m excited to see the chaos when I get to the end.
Good enough review for me too. I’ll pick it up the first time it goes on sale.
Finally, beat Hotel Dusk last night in the pitch dark of my bedroom underneath my blankets. It’s a great game to play before you sleep because there is a surreal, dreamlike quality to the rhythm of the
game design. In fact, as you stalk the hallways of Hotel Dusk there is a slight, inexplicable haze that appears for no reason in certain areas. The effect is less pronounced than the famous fog in Silent Hill but its use indoors conveys a particular sense of claustrophobia and confusion unique to this type of pulpy noir mystery. Indeed, much of Hotel Dusk is an inversion of typical noir mysteries. I don’t want to spoil too much but it’s suggested the long lost partner the main protagonist is looking for could be much more than his police partner, but rather a lover with some unfinished business to address? A few of the female characters make sexual advances towards him and he isn’t just dismissive, he’s downright cruel towards their attempts.
It wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest his methods of finding his lost partner during the game are sociopathic, but unlike most noir protagonists, he has an extremely fragile emotional state. Should you fail a conversation in game, you’re treated to his internal monologue before a game over screen in which he’s all but suggesting suicide at his failure. This makes the stakes extremely high to go along with some well conceived characters and a mostly compelling story.
2007 was an amazing year for games, but especially for the DS. I think we’re heading for a similar golden age with the switch. One last thing, the music is sublime, please give it a chance if you have an opportunity today.
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don’t get your point on soundtrack, tho. it’s far cry from anything else in MegaTen verse (including P1) but is there really any soundtrack out there that isn’t a facsimile of established genre? I mean yeah, I sort of get where you are going with the Bleach song, but it does sound a lot cheaper and watered down than anything on Persona 5.
Related I might as well post this again
It sounds a little familar.
Square flooding Mobius Final Fantasy with FF13 stuff, I guess cause they’re still trying to make people think that they like FF13
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I played Hob for about four hours. It’s pretty good! There’s an achievement for finishing it in under five hours but I think I would have to play it a few more times to be able to do that. I do not know how far along I am just that there are still a lot of hidden achievements that I assume are story/progress related. I keep pushing forward and doing stuff and things happen and it’s all real neat but there is still a lot of the world map that I haven’t been to yet.
I kind of want to compare this to Hyper Light Drifter because they’re both billed as kind “Zelda-like” games but they’re both really different from each other despite having a lot of similarities. Wow that was vague, huh. Basically I guess I mean they’re both exploration-focused adventures with minimalist story-telling and pretty decent combat designs. Hmmm that’s still not very precise but you get the picture.
tbh Shoji Meguro always was a fan of that jazzy rock style featured in P5, since he was very big on T-Square and Casiopea in his youth, and iirc played in some sort of band?
So I guess it was his chance to finally compose what he wanted to compose, unlike most of the other OST.
I’m also enjoying Hob so far. I impulse-bought it after hearing about it here. I can’t help but notice the game’s obvious influences, but all of the familiar video gamey elements are nice and refined. It’s the type of world that I like to explore, and I like the way that things are constantly shifting around.
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As I said on the podcast, Night in the Woods structurally is just Persona and with no dungeons and zero-sum hangouts. As it turns out, I’m much more interested in reliving the glory days of post-college dropout mental illness but with friends this time than the glory days of high school but with friends this time.
I’ll probably beat P5 tho. It’s so stylish!
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West of Loathing is just the exact kind of pure fetchquestery in a light fluffy rpg that I’d been craving. Was worried I’d be turned off by the webcomicness of it, but it’s mostly just silliness and it’s not like it has memes or a ton of pop culture references. Think this kind of thing with some adjustment is basically my ideal game genre?
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Hob is still really good. The world is quite a bit bigger than I was thinking it was and you can tell they really put a lot of thought into how all of its parts and areas fit together overall. The whole game is basically a giant, intricate puzzle you’re solving from the inside out. It’s breathtaking once you start to grasp the scope of it all.
If you’re on the fence about whether or not you might like it you will probably like it.
I’ve been playing Street Fighter 5 at a friend’s house. I like it a lot more than SF4, which I also used to play at same friend’s house. Good riddance, focus attack dash cancel.
Thank you for designing a game where I can mostly get by on timing, psychology, and fundamentals. Disrupt and dismantle. Glad they had the nerve to change up the established characters. Bison may be a beast, but he’s my beast.
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Cuphead came out. I have played it. It is…OK…?
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Cuphead looks like one of those games where you want to say that it fucking sucks, really, but don’t have the heart to do it because you can see the dev really being passionate about it.
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I seriously doubt that “fucking sucks” is at all fair but I also don’t see it being any better or more significant than, say, historical curio alien hominid
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we could just call it, “artist-driven game” and convey most of the successes and failures
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