I also think Kojima games, much like… I dunno, Elden Ring, Dragon’s Dogma… really just a handful of AAA games have that x factor that’s just invisible in technical game development. Like just an unseen force that makes games that, by all logic, shouldn’t work into really good, well-loved games.
Obviously the guy knows how to get people to work a schedule, but that’s not exactly novel and even a great proportion of big failures also meet that criteria. Especially since crunch provably does not add time to a schedule—I mean asking people to add new content at midnight slightly harms the chances of that content getting in over letting people go home. (He seems kind of like he would do it anyway though, doesn’t he?)
But his games all have a sense of identity and idiosyncrasy. Whether you like them or not there’s a sort of feeling to them. It’s a really, really dramatically undervalued thing.
Iga did a good job bringing back the old band to give the particular Igavania vibe to Bloodstained too. It felt very much like a bigger version of the DS Castlevanias, which I didn’t really expect (after having been burned by Mighty No. 9)
Paper Mario has moved away from the RPG roots since the last few games and now it’s more of a frictionless point and click game with vestigial combat
I picked Origami King after not playing any game in the series since the second one. I wasn’t invested in the modern Mario world building / storytelling at all and found it a complete waste of time TBH
I’m kind of glad to see Paper Mario being reevaluated here as “maybe better than TTYD” after years of “TTYD IS BETTER!!”
this was my biggest criticism of the game by far. Paper Mario feels like a cohesive world…inasmuch as a popup book does, right? Stuff is too close together to be “realistic” but it feels right narratively and you can walk almost everywhere.
But TTYD has this weird fast travel system that ends up being about 15% of the game, maybe to justify how far you’re supposed to be going. But it ends up dissecting the world into discrete pieces and I don’t like it.
I haven’t played DkS2 but the criticism I have heard of the world-building is similar, but replace Elevators with A Place You Have To Navigate Constantly. It’s dumb as hell.
I do love quite a bit of it though! Rawk Hawk rules, Vivian is of course wonderful, and I love the black-and-white world about midway through the game.
But Paper Mario will always have my heart. It’s slight enough to be breezy, but with enough weird shit to be memorable.
is not nearly interesting enough to justify either of these
People seem to have seen Factorio and gone “Ah yes, I too can make an idle game!!” This is unnecessarily mean but i really am spending a lot of time making mistakes that cost me time, specifically waiting for resources to generate.
Also: once again someone seems to have misunderstood the importance of Inserters and just gone with conveyor belts again
I was always under the impression that Super Paper Mario is the interesting one? It looks sprawling and psychedelic, and maybe just a bit overstuffed? I own it but haven’t gotten around to it yet. How does it compare to Thousand Year Door?
I enjoyed Sticker Star quite a bit but this does seem to be the direction the series is going in.
I have long been fascinated by the Road Trip Boys content I’ve seen from FFXV, so I tried to play it. I bounced off of it like a golf ball off a tank.
Going to take another crack at it this weekend but whoo boy, it’s neither conventional enough in its treatment of open world content to give me a comfortable way in, nor coherently unconventional enough (as elden ring was) to engage me in a new way. I know if I spend any longer on this one I will inevitably develop an angry essay’s length of comments about some of the weird shit it does with in the first hour or so of the game and in particular the weird limitations of the rolls royce you drive around. It did make me want to go back to FFXIV though
the treehouse localization style (ha) changed a lot between the two of these – the latter was like, fun groaners, whereas the former was constantly-winking-in-the-worst-way, which I found hard to overlook
my notes on Final Fantasy XV are longer and angrier than anything since BioShock Infinite. It’s just stuffed with ideas halfway done, so it certainly left a lot of space for me to talk back to it.
Looking back, that demo that felt like an anxious cobbled milestone target really was representative of the whole:
it’s so raw, it feels like game development more than anything at this scale – a lot of pieces in various states of polish, a bunch of ideas that have been added over time and allowed to rot, plans and ideas that clearly exist but maybe only in various states in the minds of the directors
I haven’t played it in a while but I really liked the writing in SPM, it is a little cheesy and on the nose but enough gags land and the world and plot are kinda the last time the paper Mario team got to stretch it’s legs, and I really appreciate it for that.
It kinda forgets it’s own gimmick about halfway through though, but it’s fluffy enough that it mostly doesn’t drag the rest down.
Maybe I’d feel differently today? But it’s definitely worth giving it a shot.
I played Astebreed!
Although it’s super cool visually, as a game it’s not very good. It doesn’t really test skills much, it’s basically super easy apart from two very steep difficulty spikes (the last two bosses). The novelty coming from the controls gimmick lasts very little and becomes soon monotonous.
I liked what I played of sticker star on a mechanical level. It’s the nintendo version of Riveira but the writing was even flatter and nearly devoid of any character outside of surface level Mario fluff. As far as I played the only NPCs you talked to were Toads and sprites already made for battles. It felt like the lowest effort Mario game game in that time span of 3DS and Wii U.
I just replayed about the first half of it and I concur with this take. It’s a mess. Some of it is very cool and charming. It also does things that I think a lot of games wouldn’t even try for. At the end of the day it’s really hard to summarize.
I guess if I had to do an elevator pitch, it’s a latter-day final fantasy action game that someone decided to build a Ubisoft open world game into, based entirely on descriptions of how open world games work
AssCree Original Flavor really set the course for about 12 years of game design that we are just now starting to come out of. Feel like maybe I should play some of the original just for…this context I don’t entirely have even if I played all the better versions of it.
I’ve been playing Elden Ring Second Character as self care because I am a coward to go to Loop 2 with my original.
As one of the people on the forum who is probably the most kindly disposed to this series… I really can’t recommend going back to original. It’s janky and not like in a “charmingly idiosyncratic” way. The Ezio trilogy feels like what they were actually going for the first time around.
That said, I haven’t played another one ever since that trilogy, even by then I felt like it was getting stale. I keep meaning to play the pirate one, though.
