I’ve started playing Prey, and thank god I’m playing this one after Deathloop, otherwise I’d have been even more seriously pissed off by Deathloop’s failings.
7 Likes
played itazura tenshi a little bit today in mame. just enough to pass one full stage.
it’s really cute. you play as an angel lighting up constellations in space, and i guess the point is you are trying to let these two lovers meet. they are probably a pair of famous constellations or something with some myth attached. maybe i heard/read it at some point but my memory retention on this stuff is bad
everything looks cute and the music is calming. every time you finish a constellation the game stops to show the entire thing drawn out and somehow this doesn’t feel tedious or annoying. maybe because it also erases all enemies and dangers on screen when doing so.
sometimes you can find a bow to pick up, and maybe a heart flies by which to shoot, making it explode and filling in any onscreen stars. or an astronaut in need of help floats by and you can save them for a bonus.
it gets really mean pretty fast with enemies being increasingly on top of you, but it still kind of just feels nice to play.
once all constellations are filled you get an event that seemed to be playable where you try to get these two to run into each other so they can finally be together. it’s adorable
19 Likes
almost assuredly The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, symbolized by the stars Vega and Altair
Japan’s tanabata has its roots in this folktale.
Notably, the stars Vega and Altair are on opposite sides of the milky way, and the folktale involves a bridge of magpies allowing the two lovers to finally cross the milky way and meet.
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i thought the milkyway being in the background was just decoration until i read this
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Finding this bridge level of Dishonored to be kind of long. Lots of traversal. I keep resetting back to a save when I get discovered, sometimes the blink mechanic sends me where I shouldn’t go and I lose a lot of progress that way. Using blink to get around feels like cheating in a way, but I feel like cheating.
That said, their encounter system seems really robust, enough for them to make extended levels like this and have them seemingly not fall apart. Level detail remains pretty consistent throughout.
5 Likes
i surprised myself a while back by beating ff15 and enjoying it tremendously, so i decided to put together a list of other jrpgs to try out, in an effort to educate myself and widen my tastes.
i’ve had a weird relationship to jrpgs for a long time. even tho i’ve played and enjoyed a number of them, i tend to burn out or lose momentum before the end. i think on some level i kinda felt like they just weren’t for me, especially if they were turn-based.
but after having such a good time w ff15 it occurred to me that maybe i just wasn’t playing the right ones. after all there’s so many of them, and it didn’t sit right with me as a game designer, to have this “not my thing” feeling toward such a huge subset of games.
i’m now six games into my list and can safely say that i actually love jrpgs! i think i just needed to get a little older, and to familiarise myself with the genre some more. that and i think just putting the games together in a list like this changes the way i approach each game. if i don’t like one of them then oh well. think critically about why i didn’t like it and move on to the next one.
anyway here’s a brief overview of what i’ve played so far:
final fantasy xv
game owns. love to roam around with my boys in the luxury chrysler audi. i love the towns. i love the super detailed food models. i actually really enjoyed the combat too, and i think it was a nontrivial part of what kept me playing.
this was my first mainline final fantasy (i’d previously only played crystal chronicles) and i played all the way through and even did a bunch of optional dungeons and super hard quests. the weird platformer dungeon is so good and it is crazy to me that it’s hidden away like that.
resonance of fate AKA
time and eternity no wait that’s the other ps3 gunpegend of eternity
this game is pretty dumb but i had a good time. as i have since had confirmed, resonance of fate is a classic tri-ace game: it has really amazingly designed systems but couldn’t write itself out of a wet paper bag. it’s also like weirdly cruel and sexist to its only female protag in a way that i just don’t understand even a little. everyone is a cunt to her even though she is nothing but kind and helpful.
unfortunately this game has a case of too-fucking-long-and-not-enough-level-design-itis. i played for like 30 hours before it introduced a battle arena that wasn’t a flat box with some walls in it. really weird cos its battle system owns and is crying out for exciting level design.
if this game wasn’t written by a sexist toddler (and if it had even an ounce of pacing) it could probably be pretty good! oh well.
final fantasy vii babeyyy
speaking of good writing and pacing! what can i even say? i love aerith and i love tifa and i love putting magicite in my got darn equipment!
i’d never seen or played any ff7 before (at least not the original. i’d seen advent children and i watched dylan play some of the remake) so apart from the culturally osmotic spoilers the whole thing was new to me. i was kinda blown away by how huge it was, and how well the story trundled along the whole time. even in the switch version the game was beautiful, although, as with all squeenix remasters, i don’t understand how anyone could think that upping the resolution was in any way a good idea.
i wasn’t as in love with the combat as i was with the previous two games, but it didn’t feel bad either. i want to be exposed to lots of different systems anyway, just to see how different games approach them and what effect that has on the whole experience.
anyway it owned and i played it all the way through.
valkyrie profile 2: silmeria
another tri-ace through and through. not a single writer to be seen but god damn they’ve got some combat designers. also the towns! oy vey the towns in this are so delicious. shame about the actual dungeons which are extremely lackluster.
i played through like the first 4 dungeons or something like that and jesus christ the plot was just glacial, and the world was nowhere near as compelling as resonance of fate. still, i enjoyed it enough that i might give vp1 a go sometime idk. that game has nice graphics.
dragon quest 11
good lord what a game. they really said “what if we made it extremely good all the way through” huh. there is nothing particularly special about any of its ingredients but the mixture is just right.
i’d played some of dq7 on the 3ds but kinda fell off because i was a baby child and not ready to play pegs yet. still, i’m glad i put dq11 a little further down in my list because it has so many of the things that i feared in jrpgs: really straight-forward turn-based combat, standard fantasy world, extremely long and wandering story. i think if i’d played this before ff7 i wouldn’t have been as ready to enjoy myself. as it was i had a real good time! the whole game goes down easy and the plot just keeps on ticking along at a rate that feels so nice. also every party member is cool?? why doesn’t every game do that??? they’re all cool and my friends and i love them.
i done beat the whole game and i was very ready for it to end by the time it did. game is too long. also idk if i feel the desire to play any other dragon quests (there’s none on my list atm) chiefly because, as i understand it, they’re mostly the same. i respect the series now a lot more than i did before i played it, but i don’t feel compelled to explore any more of it right now. that being said, it really has set the standard for pacing in a way which none of the others did. really a remarkable achievement and i do not regret any of my time spent with it.
panzer dragoon saga AKA azel: panzer dragoon rpg AKA graphics: the videogame
this game is a luxury item. it’s refined. it has no cruft whatsoever. it also has no equal; there are no videogames like panzer dragoon saga. even the other entries in the series (which are beautiful, don’t get me wrong) don’t hold a candle to how excellent it is. it feels like a game from the future, a future where the medium has matured and thrown off so much of the bullshit that holds it down.
all that being said, unlike some of the previous games on this list, saga does not go down easy. i had to work to focus on it and play it through to the end, which seems incongruous, given how much i loved it the whole time. i also don’t really know why this was the case or what could have been done differently (either in terms of its design or in my approach to playing it) to counter this. i want to lay the blame at my own feet rather than the game’s, because i think the things that made harder to swallow are precisely the absence of cruft and excess and skinner-box evils that make it feel so futuristic. it has no grinding or side-quests or time-wasting of any kind. it has plenty of secrets and the world feels rich and dense. it respects itself too much to string you along with little dopamine hits. it’s frankly a miraculous game. i spent my whole playthrough waiting for it to pull some bullshit that would sour everything and it never did.
anyway yeah extraordinarily good game. audio-visually stunning. beautiful towns. great writing. mechanically triumphant. constantly surprising and so well put together. it’s crazy to me that team andromeda did such incredible work and then just fuckn dipped. criminal.
and that’s where i’m up to. as you can maybe tell, i’ve been trying to alternate between “classical” and “fushigi” type games. games that are part of the canon and those that are weirder and more obscure. which means that the next game on my list falls into the first category, and that game is final fantasy xii.
idk if i’ll write about it straight away or if i’ll go through a few before continuing (i have no shortage on games in my list) so we’ll just have to wait and see.
jrpgs! they’re pretty good!
28 Likes
should be nothing surprising about this, ffxv owns
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Since his rescue is essential to the conspiracy, more than just failing a win condition, his death would constitute a complete collapse of everyone’s plan.
Also, you wanna see this man interact with Brad Dourif’s character, for sure. People forget, but Dishonored’s voice cast is STACKED unlike any other game from that era.
4 Likes
Caught the guy who sells upgrades being a real creeper, unfortunately I can’t blast this guy to kingdom come because it ends the game, but I can throw bottles at the guy and he still has to sell me stuff
This game presents “Moral Ambiguity” in a lot better ways than any other game I played. The people you’re working with used to run a dog fighting pit, and it’s the scene for this interrogation scene. They have servants, and I caught one of them berating one for some dumb reason. They also want to restore the monarchy, for some reason, and had you capture a guy who was experimenting on humans (who they refer to as a genius). They aren’t good people!
Videogame princess made me fan art, that’s neat
look at this huge jello mold
anyway enjoying it. Seems like the final mission is coming up? there’s no way this game is that short…
7 Likes
Banjo-Tooie is one of the more hateful games I’ve ever played. In the first hour I think I played 15 minutes. Has to pan around and have characters talk endlessly. And make the environments really big so you have to walk across them. And then put all your upgrades and stage unlocks on opposites sides of the world.
You can tell all the warp pads where put in at the last minute because Nintendo said the children would riot.
Upon conpleting the puzzle to unlock the first world the game immediately informed I did not have enough Jiggies to unlock the second (I did not have the chance to even unlock anything yet.) also there is a 45 second cutscene to show a door somewhere in the world opening.
In the first world you are immediately bombarded with things you cannot do yet. As you slowly slowly move around.
The game makes you transform or switch characters. The only way to undo it is to walk all the way back to where you started.
In the second world you are immediately given Fire Eggs. 30 seconds afterwards you see Red Barrels. Aha you think. No. Oh they have a wick, maybe I gotta shoot th-no. Um…okay. The solution: Collect a goblin and give it to a big titty offensive First Nations lady so she can turn you into…The Dentenator for dynamite so you can wonder the stage trying to remember where you saw all those Red Barrels. Then line up directly with their wicks otherwise you will just self destruct and lose 1/6 of your life. Once you are done wondering or give up waddle back to the lady to turn back into Banjo, wasting your time!
The breaking point was after running circles around the world. All the while coming across boulders that none of my attacks would break, in world 2 I finally found my upgrade guy and he gave me…a slightly longer butt stomp to break those boulders. My vision squinted.
The messed up part playing this terrible game with contempt for anyone that played it was more fun for me than Psychonauts 2. Which I went back to briefly and just got more and more uncomfortable playing it. Turns out folks didn’t say too much on the forum about that one.
I’m not going back to Tooie either. Gotta try Kameo! I definitely haven’t tried that game 3 times before bouncing off immediately each time.
14 Likes
What didn’t you like about pyschonauts 2? I also haven’t really seen people talk about it
I mean I did, it was one of my favorite games last year. I thought it was a shockingly good follow up, and the story and writing kept me hooked through the exactly competent enough gameplay.
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Last week I played an MMO raid with friends for the first time ever! It was the Alexander Raids from FFXIV. the game treats its raids as 12-episode questlines, with big cutscenes between every dungeon/boss fight. This one had a surprisingly engaging story about infiltrating a gigantic mech that’s also a god of time travel, summoned by the collective wills of a bunch of moronic techie goblins who found its schematics in an old book and believed in the tech so hard that it just manifested itself. They want to use it to rewrite history to put themselves in charge and create a goblin’s idea of utopia, but you’re gonna put a stop to that!
My gf and I both jumped on this and enlisted the help of the SB (and others) Free Company (FFXIV’s term for a guild). We blasted through it and had a great old time! Most participants were veterans, which helped us know what to do for gimmick fights and such.
The music was so great and so over-the-top. The best moment of the whole thing was this fight where all the robots you’d faced up to that point come together and form a voltron while this amazing Final Fantasy version of a 70’s tokusatsu theme song plays, complete with horns and cheering children:
I’m not really an MMO guy, but this game’s story content (which makes up the bulk of the experience) is for real one of the best JRPGs I’ve ever played.
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only game ive had the energy for is minecraft. currently filling in a chunk of ocean for a silly project on the selectbutton server. i think the isolation is making me go mad
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Rather enjoyed the ten seconds of the Valkyrie Profile 2 opening I saw because my steam deck said Enough and closed the emulator.
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The short answer is I Don’t Like It. The care in every single aspect is impressive. Like each normal pickup is bespoke to the world it is in.
On the other hand it really expects you to have reverence for Psychonauts and for you to remember it. Like the main character worshipped some trash magazine about psychics that he cites story and issue number constantly when meeting someone. Except all the stories are true and everyone is flattered that he has this completely correct view of memorizing World Weekly.
Then maybe more of a pet peeve of mine after the first level you go to psychic headquarters meet the Director who says all your accomplishments of the first game are shit and now you are an intern. Then meet the other interns who bully you. Except you are clearly an unrecognized genius. I hate bullying in media and I also hate everyone get out of my way for my genius. Your next goal was jumping inside the mind of the director to change her mind about the interns going on a mission. From hearing others talk about it I am sure this will come around to bite the interns and player in the ass but it is not even a moral decision for a second at the time.
Then everyone goes to a casino and the head secret psychic agent says “now stay in the hotel room, you know casinos do not allow psychics.”
Maybe that is part of it. The whole game so far has been petulant brat of being No Do Not Play The Game and the main character No We Will Play The Game. Then you play the platformer and navigate far over designed menus and have to collect or buy merit badges and there are a dozen currencies and upgrades and you have like 12 psychic powers you have to remember so you can set them to the bumper buttons. The game stops you to go Hey Here Is Another Psychic Power Equip It Now. And I really feel like the game is to be as obsessive about it as the main character is about a fictional trash mag. Be enough of a dorkus and be rewarded!
So yes again
I Did Not Like It
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I finally got the mame fullset which is something i’ve always been afraid of doing. once you start playing games like this you can never go back.
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it’s probably good that you bailed before you got to the extended invader zim voice cast reunion slash backtracking collectathon gag. the real twisted mind of tim schafer
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the game aspect of psychonauts 2 is really just a lattice for telling a story and showing off some nice art direction. unfortunately, i found the story somewhere along the lines of “disney original movie” with some lazy jokes. did not care for it at all. game looks great though, excellent art direction.
comparing it to banjo tooie is really interesting.
the only credit ill give tooie is it absolutely hates you and doesnt give a shit. dk64 is a worse collectathon, but tooie basically is a curel experiment to see how much youll keep playing despite being miserable. run back and forth between our series of empty canyon hubworlds. remember the cute tutorial badger? murdered in the opening cutscene. congrats, you finally can become a trex, it sucks.
pscyhonauts 2 is way too eager to please. it has something serious to talk about: trauma. now here’s 10 bacon jokes.
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