following up on my mission to play a buncha pegs:
final fantasy xii:
the phantom menacezodiac edition (i played on ps4)
kinda mixed on this one. like i get it, it’s clearly real cool, but it was way less glimmeringly perfect than i’d hoped. the graphics were obvs outstanding, but the gambit system seems to have been both inadvisably fiddled with (don’t make me choose which class my characters are permanently locked in to! i don’t know anything! do a game design and choose the most interesting arrangements of classes for the story got darn it!) and was also not as deep as i had imagined (i was expecting to be able to put the controller down and just watch, but the gambits didn’t actually cover a lot of stuff that i wanted so i had to keep my hands on the wheel more than i’d hoped).
anyway i had a good time but i got to like the 3rd or 4th town and was like ok yeah i get it i think. it’s cool and i respect those for whom it is their favourite. maybe i’d like the original more.
parasite eve (ps1 emulated)
hell yeah dude, hell yeeeeaaah. what a game. what a tremendous game. i really liked this one a lot. the music, the graphics, the combat (which was so immediately evocative and made me wonder why there aren’t heaps of parasite-eve-likes). the whole thing felt pretty rough and like they were working real fast to get it done, but it’s just so charming. and i still like it even tho i got killed by the cinematic chase at the end because of the pick-a-path T-intersection, so i had to beat the final boss twice lol.
parasite eve 2 is actually the next game on my list after this batch, so i’m excited to see what weird trends they were chasing instead of working on improving the beautiful thing they’d started.
shin megami tensei: strange journey (ds emulated and blown up comically large on my huge tv (i played w a ps3 battlefield controller and those weird switches on the underside were so useful; i lounged so hard while grindin this one))
yeah man this game is cool and has maybe the sickest dungeon crawler graphics of any game (the shopping mall level dude, come on) but god it does not respect me or my time. the writing was some trite atlus bs and the late game dungeons were just some fuckn garbage. a million identical rooms with unmarked teleporters that lead to other identical rooms with unmarked teleporters is not level design! it’s a fucking disgrace!
shame cos it plays real good. this is my first smt that i’ve actually pushed through and tried to understand (i bounced off smt4 twice as an idiot 20yo) and yeah i love smt now. it’s good shit, count me in (just to be a dickhead weirdo i’m guna play smt spiral journey next lol).
hylics (pc)
[prolonged wet farting noises]
disappointingly conservative game with incredible graphics, annoying* writing, and music that i don’t even remember (*i actually barely remember the writing either so maybe it’s not as dreadful as i feel it was) all in service of a game where fucking nothing is happening??? idk man i was real sad abt this one. just so tepid and offensively inoffensive. thumbs down.
but, it does make me wanna look more into the huge and poorly documented field of RPG Maker (rpgmaker? rpg-maker?) games cos i bet there’s some real good shit in there for sure.
final fantasy iv (i played the psp one on my psp)
idk man i think i’m just not down w the early fifans yet. i gotta enter a different phase of my life before i can appreciate them. at the moment they just strike me as really uninspiring, but i feel pretty sure that my reasons for feeling this way are kinda bs. 2d graphics gotta try way harder for me to be interested, whereas if u gimme any old dinky 3d i’m p much big chillin straight away.
anyway i just kinda found everything banal, and it made me real sad. i played for, idk a couple days. like 10 hours total maybe? 15? idk, quite a while. but i understand that it’s not much in the scheme of pegs.i’ll try again when i’m older.
xenogears (ps1 emulated)
and yet, despite the above claims about dinky 3d graphics, for some fucking reason, xenogears cannot seem to get its teeth into me. i have stopped at the same place the last 3 times i’ve tried to play it, but i just put it down and don’t come back! why??? idgi. i think i just gotta be more disciplined – gotta find a book club or something – cos i reckon once i get deep in there it’ll capture me, i feel certain. anyway, we’ll try again. just as with smt i’m sure i’ll become a xeno freak some day.
atelier escha and logy: alchemists of the dusk sky (pc)
speaking of freaks. i’ve been eyeballin the atelier games for years now but they’ve always been prohibitively expensive, so i acquired this copy by cheaper means, with the intention of being a Good Consumer should i really like it and decide that Gust deserves my money.
anyway it’s pretty good! i totally get what people are talking about. it’s got nice b-grade graphics and c-grade writing and some real good mechanics floating around in there and it just goes down easy. it’s not astonishing or life-changing but i’d happily play more of it and maybe one day i’ll fork out for a ps4/5 copy (the pc copy i have doesn’t work in full screen so it’s not ideal).
i feel obligated to do some Normal Review type writing here cos i couldn’t find any when i was tryna work out its deal: the combat is fairly standard turn-based stuff, with some meters to build and specials to unleash, and some mild (very mild) spatial elements. you make items, but really items are just abilities that u hold in your inventory; the key distinction here is that items replenish when u go home, just as spells or sth would in another game. they’re not true consumables (a fear that kept me from this series for so long) so the thing you’re tryna do is make items that have better qualities that suit your use case (these include normal stuff like greater damage/effect, but also slightly more interesting stuff like more uses at the expense of taking up more inventory space, or having higher power but taking two turns to use), and the actual mechanics of building items is a fun-without-being-laborious game of choosing ingredients that are good or bad and balancing different bars and numbers, and it’s all just… nice.
i only played enough to know i like it (around 10-15 hours?) and i’ll definitely be playing more.
yo-kai watch 2: bony spirits (3ds)
beat this game tonight and i’m really glad i came back to it after not really vibing with it years ago (mostly because i wasn’t ready for jpegs yet and because i was expecting it to be pokemon, which, thank goodness, it’s not). i had a really great time with this, much more so than i was expecting. i’ve played a few level5 pegs at this point and they’re all so close to being cool but ultimately fail to capture me, usually because they’re mechanically limp, but this one was so chill and relaxed and having a fun time and not tryna be too grandiose or serious, and i love that it all takes place basically in one town! that’s so cool! and because of the way the story is structured you don’t get to explore all of the town through the main quests, so it feels really big and dense the whole time (yes yes i know i should play the yakuza games, dylan! i’ll get to em).
i was really impressed by the final boss which was really hard and had a bunch of forms and new mechanics that mess with your old strategies; i was not expecting something that cool from this game.
as i said before, the localisation is really pretty bad in places, but the vibes and the play were excellent, and i am so glad i came back to try this one again. big recommend (especially if u can read japanese; prolly play the jp one).
this has been a good mission and i intend to see it through to the end. it’s nice to enjoy videogames again.
as mentioned, next up is parasite eve 2, and then i’ve got a few cool things lined up, some of which i even get to play on real hardware (lookin at u, last story)!