It almost reaches the limit, maybe the luckiest ring I ever had besides unique level.
And I’m playing Diablo 1 in these days.
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yesterday i tried to play some games on my Series X but because Live was down i couldn’t play anything.
so i turned on my Sega Genesis and finally started Shining Force II for the first time, and i guess it has a really long, unskippable intro, and then my food arrived and i didn’t play any games.
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I spent the day indulging in nostalgia. Welcome to the world of…
This was one of the only games on my DOS machine as a child and was my only real exposure to videogames before I found the Descent demo and scarred myself for life. It was created by the very talented Veda Hlubinka-Cook.
For those unfamiliar, D Slash Generation is an isometric puzzle game where you play as a lone courier who jetpacks into Singapore with a very important package for none other than renowned lothariobio-engineer Jean-Paul SartreDerrida. Here’s the man of the hour:
Naughty Jean-Paul has been illegally creating bio-weapons known as Neogens and now something very bad has happened at the lab. Thinking that the package in your hands may be the key to resolving this crisis, you selflessly throw yourself into the fray. Cue the obligatory cyberpunk rooftop landing scene:
The game requires eight-way movement which can be tricky if you don’t have a number-pad. The game does however allow you to ‘rotate’ the normal arrow keys through 45 degrees to function as diagonals if needed.
Ever the diligent worker, you make your way to the reception with the package, but you sense that something may be amiss.
Full disclosure, I don’t recall this amazing scene being in the DOS version but I’m using the Amiga version for gifs and it was too good to leave out.
General gameplay revolves around avoiding or neutralizing the rogue security mechanisms and escaped bio-weapons. Once a room is ‘secure’ you can move on. You can also speak with, and rescue, survivors scattered across the maps with each rescue awarding you with another life.
In the room above you will find the indispensable laser gun. I sure as shit couldn’t find it as a kid though because it’s hidden behind Santa’s table at the back!
In the next room you will encounter the first bio-weapons, the Rover/Guardian like enemies as featured in cult-TV classic The Prisoner.
To avoid being maimed, you will need to use that handy laser gun you totally found behind Santa’s table in the last room. The laser-beams bounce!
The next few rooms are your standard action-puzzle fare with plenty of traps, switches and roving enemies. The game does a really good job of playing with player knowledge of the enemies and interactable objects. Some of the art direction and animation is also lovely, like this camera angle swap that comes out of nowhere:
The goal is to make your way through 10 floors of the building and come into contact with Derrida before the plot is fully revealed (spoilers). The story is wonderfully executed for '91 with generous NPC dialog and even unique animations for certain characters.
The game gets pretty trippy later on and has some nice set-pieces towards the end. I don’t want to spoil anything for those of you who are interested so here’s a wildly out of context gif instead!
D/Generation! Play it I guess, it’s great!
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It really is Shining Force Week here at selectbutton. I got to the final battle of Book1 of Shining Force CD. I failed because I’d been keeping my main character who dies in two hits away from the action. And the final battle requires you use that guy to hit the last boss for at least 10 turns in a row. It sucks! So do I spend an evening leveling up? No!
Now debating between seeing if the battles got more interesting in Book 2 or finally moving on to SF2 and get bored by the intro like Isfet just did.
Khan really mind poisoned me because I did noticed wow all these battles in Book 1 are uninteresting and tedious. Then as soon as I have to think about intentional leveling I start to resent SRPGs as a genre.
I played most of Book 1 on mute listening to music I had been neglecting. Which worked pretty well and felt justified when there wasn’t even an original theme during the final battle. The music is fine and it is by Climax Entertainment so I loved all the stuff I could recognize from Landstalker.
Like there is a line between plesantly simple and sit there tricking the AI to come out of it’s hole so you don’t get swarmed.
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D/Generation caught my attention briefly when it popped up on the Switch eShop some time ago. Had never heard of it, but from what you say, it sounds pretty neat.
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It’s on the what!?
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Right? There’s even two versions.
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Picked up Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate on sale, it’s been a blast being back in the ‘old’ style of monhun game… I really missed the more deliberate monster tracking process, though I’m not sure it would’ve been good in Rise with the bigger/open maps anyway.
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Sounds more like your controller’s broken, unless you mean going to school and sneaking into the castle?
i loved d/generation as a kid! it felt so cool and sophisticated~
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reminder for the shining force (that’s you, playing shining force. you’re the shining force) to rememeber the classes as the gods knew them before, in the old tongue, the true language of class abbreviations
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that’s right selectbutton we’re back for shining force week here in the house of khan and i’ve gotta tell ya, the game sure hasn’t gotten better!
kalirant ahead
in the interest of sounding less jaded than usual, i’ll even open with some things i like! most of the optional party members are neat, in particular, my perfect baby boy Domingo who i would KILL for. LOOK at him. SQUID. WIZARD. SQUIZARD.
he’s also a good example of something that i think is simultaneously funny and frustrating, but mostly funny, which is that the optional party members are so much better than the ones who have to join the team it’s not even fucking close. when i got domingo he was level one and my other casters at that point were around … i think around 11 or 12? and he was better in almost every stat, but particularly has so much defense that he’s actually a tank. also he is a … “half-flier” i guess you could say? He can’t move over some tiles that fliers can (mostly arbitrary, like he can’t move over gray mountains for some reason) but otherwise can move over anything including gaps and water completely unimpeded, but ALSO STILL GETS THE BONUS FOR STANDING ON TERRAIN LIKE FORESTS. he’s fucking B U S T E D, it’s hilarious. also he’s one of i believe two characters (the other being another optional unit) who learns the spell DESOUL, which is an instakill with pretty bad success odds but which actually has way higher odds (or even guaranteed success maybe?) on the dragons in the endgame, which is hilarious.
then there’s optional centaur knight Arthur, who although starts off shitty and ALSO has shitty level ups for his first half or so, ends up not only being the only knight to learn magic, but also gets just some absolutely bonkers fucking stats. anyway then because shining force hates you his level-ups are bad again when he promotes, which is mostly just frustrating, because to get the most out of him you genuinely have to promote him as late as possible, which then means he’ll probably never get back to having good level ups in his back half of being promoted. Which, considering your stats drop when you promote … ehhhh he went from being “oh cool a unit you need to really commit to” to just kind of annoying. (he’s still one of my best units regardless tho)
anyway the graphics also still slap. and that’s everything nice i have to say about shining force!
so this will come as a shock to some, but did you know that once you get past the halfway point in shining force, some enemies start to move? i know, it’s really shocking! don’t worry, it’s still not most of them, and you still definitely can’t accurately predict who will, but they do! sometimes. you might almost start to think you’re playing a video game
the level designs, thankfully, have moved away from constant bottlenecks. but don’t worry, every battle on the ‘world map’ is still the worst shit i’ve ever seen in a tactics game! so here’s what the world map was in chapter 7, as a good point for me to talk about it:
for your assistance, let me explain what we’re seeing here:
- gray mountains are true flier-only
- brown mountains halve infantry and third cavalry movement, unless they’re lucky enough to be wearing the mobility ring or be domingo. they give a 30% terrain bonus (i’m pretty certain this impacts damage)
- big forests are identical to brown mountains, except that beast units can walk through them unimpeded. this includes our werewolf Zylo and most grounded monsters who aren’t skeletons or horses
- the smaller forests are identical to big forests, except iirc their bonus is only 15%, and cavalry movement is only halved instead of reduced by a third.
the first time we’re here, it’s in that top half. which, yes, you’re seeing right, there’s not a single fucking tile where the majority of your units can move normally. That means most of your units moving 2 tiles every turn, with a few exceptions. and everyone taking reduced physical damage. it’s as much of a boring slog as it sounds like.
we can also see, in that first battle, all that space below us with that castle/city gate at the very bottom. in any other game, i might call this ‘foreshadowing’. “aha!” i’d say, “i will go there next. i bet that is the city of runefaust, once called protectora”. instead, because this is shining force, and because i can see that the majority of those tiles will reduce my movement drastically and that it’s a long hike, this feels like a threat from the level designers to me.
anyway. the dungeon bits are, uh, well they’ve mostly been better recently? i mean i don’t find them particularly fun, but my main guy is pretty damn levelled and deals stupendous damage with the endgame sword so bosses aren’t really an issue, so. at least they’re not so tedious as a march through a mountain range.
alright mechanical nitpick speedrun: double attacks are completely random and influenced by nothing but a hidden variable tied to each character and monster. We already have critical hits for that, so this just seems silly to me. oh also dodge is also something you have no impact over. So missing, criticals, and double-attacks are all 100% out of your control which just makes them frustrating for me. There’s not even a sure strike buff or anything iirc, so as far as i can tell i just can’t interact with any of these on purpose. Magic is interesting, actually, because every spell has set damage it deals and also there’s no magical defense! … well except that a lot of late-game enemies do in fact seem to have magical defenses and take less damage than they’re supposed to from spells. None of my units have this quality, which, mostly feels frustrating because also in the endgame most enemies have a magic-damage attack they can do instead of their normal one. a lot of the non-optional units who get tossed at your party in the back half of the game are immediate benchers because their stats just do not compete, which like, iunno i’m fine with in something like fire emblem because it has permadeath and these are like explicitly worse replacement units for dead guys. but this game has resurrection for what may as well be free so it’s just kinda funny to me like i’m not gonna go grinding, NOT EVEN for the cute foxgirl wizard! i value my time more than my heart man. also the fact that half the battles tend to drastically reduce movement through shittons of terrain or through bottlenecks means it’s real hard to ever level up people who aren’t lucky enough to roll into acting early on turn one. also every heal spell gives the same XP, so the best choice for levelling a healer is drastically removed from the best choice for the battle, but not in a way that i think feels interesting? also buff and debuff spells don’t give you XP atall (or they give you literally 1) which basically just makes them seem like a waste of MP, honestly.
i’ve got just the final dungeon left now and i’ll probably finish it just cuz it’ll bother me if i don’t, but i’m not gonna post about the game again. shining force 2 has a rat, and the remake of 1 on the gba has some interesting-ish changes, and well cd is two games im not about to attempt that, but i’m probably not gonna play any more of the series. i MIGHT play 3 cuz i like the graphics and i’m interested to see how it handles some of its new mechanics, but. iunno mostly playing these has got me wanting to go back and replay some pre-3ds fire emblem as a top-down-grid-with-pop-out-battles tactics game palate cleanser. maybe thracia, i’ve been thinking about it a lot recently.
anyway i said it before i think but imo most of this games issues come down to seeing dragon quest do something and then not thinking for long enough about what that accomplishes in dragon quest or what the consequences of that mechanical decision are. which, like, that’s not an issue unique to shining force, LOADS of games take things from their inspirations without thinking for long enough about it. it’s just a shame cause this game’s graphics are absolutely gorgeous and some of these characters are so delightful, i really wish it wasn’t such a chore.
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imo Shining Force 2 was the closest the series ever came to not being dramatically obsoleted by its contemporaries (which may or may not have been localized at the time), though 3 is really visually compelling
it only rarely feels like an SRPG though, it feels almost like Ultima 4/5 combat, where it’s grid based just because the exploration was too
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I played shining force 2 on a nomad in like 1996 which means I might’ve experienced this franchise as more modern than almost anyone else in the world
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I looked at some fanart and thought about Katana Zero
by @Liquidism (not linked because account is set to private)
I enjoyed the characters and writing a lot.
The little girl neighbor is adorable.
by @artzono
The main antagonist for most of the game is bizarrely charming
by Dracobrother
I loved the scene in V’s limo and that the dialogue choices had a small impact on the level following it.
By @RollingRubic
I enjoyed the brief playable section as the other Dragon, but felt that subplot wasn’t developed very much. Likely it’ll be continued into the free DLC and whatever form the sequel takes.
By @DEL_streamer
The boss-fight against Headhunter was easily one of my favorite parts of the game.
I loved how the game interwove writing into the fight, and the actual fight was very enjoyable. I feel like a lesser game would have made this fight too hard, but Katana Zero allowed the fight to be short and the first part to be easy after playing it a few times. It looked good. It felt good. It had good story surrounding it. Just perfect all-around.
by @JimmyDArtist
Overall, I liked Katana Zero a lot.
I’m looking forward to the upcoming free DLC expansion and any other future Katana Zero stuff.
I’ve played a lot of good games lately, I don’t know that I’d even go so far as to say this was better than most, but in some ways it felt like the most complete. There’s just something very compelling about how the story’s presentation and writing compliments the game.
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Assault Suit Larry
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Well, I snort-cackled
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just dildos spilling out of the pockets
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100% true for Book 1. You get Amigo a healing jellyfish wizard as a secret character in battle 20/22. I had a girl wizard that I never could level because by the time she got within range a flying enemy would beline to her and one shot her every fight. The beastman had incredible stats except for damage.
Everything on gamefaqs about these games was written before 2003 so it’s all 17 year olds going You Need To Grind For Two Hours. Which really ruins how fast the damn game is.
Will say does look like on paper CD Book 2 is more interesting and you can play it immediately.
Love it when the late game enemies block my attack then get to counter attack, then get a turn immediately afterwards and hit twice. That’s the point where I start wondering if they fucked the math for rentals. I’m on Normal here!
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