Played through Beneath a Steel Sky again. It still holds up! Was a fun way to spend the rainy weekend, I laughed a lot.
Bonus forum burn:
27 Likes
Capcom Baseball (1989)
Cute and fun. Very pretty grainy colors. I was doing better than I normally do in baseball games, but this weird thing happened where I’d try to throw the ball between outfielders, and it’d suddenly swerve in midair and fly sideways to a different player, like it bonked an invisible wall. Maybe it was pitying my choice? The made-up teams are:
- Galileis
- Carks
- Durians
- Srellows
- Tigyres
- Whiters
- Lionets
- AE
- AW
- Capcom Games
16 Likes
The pitcher’s face in the “play ball” pic is perfect
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Although you don’t need to do it, not eating or drinking regularly gives you debuffs, cutting off your health regen. Also I do get people coming to sit in booths, although that might have been a fix from the first patch. Also of course they mostly do this at meal times.
I’ve been playing Shadows of Doubt all weekend I think there are a couple things it gets really right that you didn’t mention.
First, the corkboard makes it seem a lot more formal than it is but it really gets hunches right, ie there’s a lot of less formal things you can use to solve a case when you can’t draw an actual line from the crime to the perp. This is directly a consequence of how much stuff the sim has and what emerges from it. There’s a point early on where I went “identifying this person would be a lot easier if I could just get a list of the tenants of this building” and what do you know, of course there’s a janitor who has an office (this soon after extends to how the town hall has files on everyone and office workers are bad at locking their computers, although not on paper so you can only search by name or initials).
But it’s also the way, say, a request for a photograph has too few details but I can trace the client through the original phone call or the door under which I’m supposed to slip the picture so I can find out more about who they know and would want a picture of, it’s the way I can check the next morning’s newspaper to find scandalous murder scene details I failed to notice, the way I’m searching for a stolen precious wine bottle and when asking neighbors I notice one has a kitchen littered with bottles of all sorts (but it’d have worked the same for a stolen baseball and a flat full of sports memorablia).
I love that since the crime has to fully happen in the sim if you’re fast enough you can take note of people panicking or running away when you reach the vincinity of the crime scene and they’ll be either witnesses or the criminal.
There was a case (“the retirement reaper”) where the criminal only murdered on floors without cameras, and I only had the estimated time of death, fingerprint and a testimony about how a tenant saw a tall suspicious person, so I handcuffed the janitor, pulled all surveillance footage for the building’s entrance for the surrounding 90 minutes then methodically sorted and pruned all featured people by height, then tenant files, leaving me with 4 anonymous mugshots which I showed to the witness who’d seen the tall person. They were able to point to the one they’d seen, so I then asked people on the street and got a general area in which that person was seen, from which I could deduce they were a factory worker. Caught them right at the end of the night shift!
That was really nice detective legwork. I mean, I also liked the case where I found a manager hammered to death, with a hammer covered in fingerprints next to them, in the room with all the employee fingerprint files. That was a different sort of fun, dunno how the newspapers called that one.
I also like the way the cyberpunk dystopia is shown through the implants, specifically, most of them are incentives to steal data or outright market brands to random people.
It’s still really rough though, and in particular rather than ask about people specifically I wish you could just present any piece of evidence during dialogues, and also I wish it hadn’t gone for the voxel look, with all the lighting problems you mentioned, it’s got a ton of really weird bugs, but it’s a real diamond in the rough. I’m really impatient to see where they will take this during the next year.
6 Likes
Akumajou Dracula (Famicom)
Japan-exclusive Easy mode! ^ _^
The differences in Easy mode, per Castlevania (NES) - The Cutting Room Floor :
- Your default amount of hearts is 30 instead of 5.
- You start with 9 lives per credit instead of 3.
- Less damage is taken from enemies and bosses.
- Bosses take double damage from regular attacks and subweapons.
- Getting hit no longer knocks you backwards. Instead, you just get frozen in place for a split second.
- You retain your subweapon and double/triple shot powerup upon death, though getting a game over will take away the latter.
- The double/triple shot powerups are retained when picking up a different subweapon.
It was indeed relatively easy and I only abused save states slightly. ^_ ^
The end fight is quite easy now!
I had the most trouble against the second-to-last boss,
who still has all those darned whirling scythe blades,
plus there’s the long run-up to him where I always take stupid hits. : P
8 Likes
been playing a lot of minecraft.
that’s all
2 Likes
I went to a lan party run by a bunch of gay furries, the kind of gay furries with a bunch of Silicon Graphics indigo machines gathering dust in the basement. admission was $10 and we played a variety of incredibly old Half Life GoldSource mods
Counter Strike 1.6
I forgot a bunch of these maps were re-created for Counter Strike Source, we played mostly rat maps, one iteration of FY Iceworld, and a mayan level that only had AKs and ARs, people were good enough to get headshots with these the moment the game started. I guess people
In attendence we had a bona-fide CS mapper who finished and released an incredibly cursed map: GMoney Cars. You may be familiar with the Nipper maps which abuse the func_vehicle that Half life uses. This map includes dozens of cursed cars including a 3 story tall pilotable snowman and a limo from a JFK Reloaded CS map.
Players had to drive the vehicles up a ramp and through a huge mouth where they’d fall into a pit and into the main play area. Except there’s multiple secret rooms, mazes, and other associated junk around. At one point me and another player found an unassuming box that had to be interacted in a certain way to find yet another secret. I am hoping the author makes a 24/7 server with this
The Specialists
Basically “What if someone made a Matrix mod for Half life, but good”. It’s a deathmatch mode where there’s bullet-time, flips and rolls, and everyone’s in trenchcoats.
The wildest movement tech I’ve seen in a half life mod. It feels so fundamentally different from other source mods. There’s even a 3rd person view. The infamous lobby scene has a map with destructible stuff in it. It’s incredibly fun to hear people shooting in a room and shoot your way through the skylight to give them the jump.
Zombie Panic
Probably the most unbalanced mod ever! Teams start with survivors and one zombie. So if you start on the zombie team it sucks shit. This happened to me several times. You attack other survivors and try to convert the entire team to zombies before you run out of respawns. Weapons are imprecise and ammo is hard to find. Most of the time I’d find one good weapon and get a few zombie kills in before dying terribly.
Most of the maps were built around the idea of finding a camping spot and then holing up. Three of them (made by the aformentioned CS mapper) had vehicles in them you could drive. One was on a path and a survivor drove around on it while the zombie team tried to jump on it without getting run over. When they finally died and the map restarted the vehicle was still in motion when the map reset, so we went multiple rounds with a vehicle hazard.
One other problem is a lot of the jumps to safe zones are behind several tricky crouch-jumps and this was very frustrating to have to maneuver around. In the endgame the zombies all have to coordinate a push against the last survivor because they’re so well held up the only way is to rush them at once, one at a time, through the gauntlet they set up.
Wizard Wars
You are a wizard with spells, it’s Half Life. This is the goofiest shit ever and I played it around 2am. One level had 3 teams? One of the attacks was you turned into a bear and could maul people? I ended up with the GeoMancer role, because the “pebble” attack was basically a shotgun blast. It was impossible to tell what spells did which effects because they all had incomprehensible fantasy names. When you ran out of mana all you could do was beat people with your staff and it was impossible to tell how you’d regain mana.
6 Likes
I sometimes think about the guy in Konami of America who was presumably like “In American culture we like our platformers unreasonably hard” and had his desired changes made to CV3.
Like who was it? And why did he only do it to CV3 and not any other Konami game?
6 Likes
Coincidentally, I’ve been getting into CS1.6 surf maps recently. I suck at it but I have beaten 4 maps so far. I hope to climb Canada’s top player chart as I learn more maps, and I think I could realistically be a top 5 player in Canada by the end of the year
6 Likes
a bunch of games got made more difficult for their western releases because some companies were paranoid that western players would just rent their games and finish them in one sitting.
it was one of, but not the only factor that led to the pretty good bare knuckle 3 getting morphed into the garbage streets of rage 3.
7 Likes
I was thinking it might have been Konami Japan. They gave the 7-years-later re-release of the first game in Japan an Easy mode. I’ve heard that Castlevania as a series hasn’t been as popular in Japan as in the US; if CV1 was a big hit in the US, being all hard and all, maybe when they went back to the CV1 formula for III, but had made CVIII for Japan somewhat easier than Normal difficulty in CV1, they thought oh well we’d better make it just as hard as CVI was for the States, they really liked that. (Which is funny considering that Famitsu had already knocked points off in their review of the Famicom version for being too hard. ^ )^)
But yeah it could just about as easily have been someone at the American side of the operation saying it!
But the US version reviewed really well so apparently they were right!
As for why not later… Well, NES was for hardcore gamers; SNES had pastel colors and rounded corners and baby Marios!
Increasing the difficulty for the US might have been part of a more general trend at the time - 15 Difficult NES Games That Were Easier in Other Regions | Den of Geek (note that Konami game TMNT II is also in that list).
It’s been theorized A look at the early days of regional difficulty changes – Destructoid that one reason was that the rental market was big in the States at the time, so game publishers feared that if someone could beat the game in the span of a single rental, they wouldn’t bother buying it, and the game’s retail sales would be hurt.
If that was it then it probably WAS someone at Konami of America!
Oh Loki beat me to it. ^ _^
4 Likes
method? I don’t see any method at all
We have so many examples from this time of games getting easier or harder for the US market, I doubt there was ever a consistent, informed opinion. Not even bad market research, just anecdotal stories shared between toy buyers and the ten-person American office. After the Japanese publisher closes that office and then restarts it a few years later, there’s no telling if the next localization manager will share any beliefs.
The console market was so driven by Nintendo, I like to think it was done in imitation of Nintendo’s heavy-handed localization. But Nintendo was smart enough to leave the game balance alone. I think the CD era did a lot to shake this loose. Even if Sony tried for a while to shape the market (“no 2D”), their overall strategy to flood the zone outweighed any precise fiddling, and that belief became standard.
9 Likes
If you’re interested in this topic, be sure to look at PC Engine games ported by Working Designs. They were notorious for doubling enemy attack power and HP.
3 Likes
most inexplicable, someone many years ago made fantranslations of the farland story series of strategy games on pc-98. what were once games known for their easiness in japan were made near-impossible to complete by some idiot for no reason
7 Likes
I remember they literally saying they made The Lion King and such deliberately harder than it needed to be to make sure kids couldn’t beat it on a rental.
9 Likes
I finished ZORTCH, and I’m here to say it SLAPS. It’s a “boomer shooter” that mixes bits of Quake 2, Unreal, and Duke 3D. Imagine someone making a game with the over-the-top nature and humour of Duke 3D (minus the sexism) in the Unreal engine (this isn’t the Unreal engine but has the same kind of wonderful loose feeling physics).
I was worried by the first level because it was so dark, big, and open-ended… I thought the game would only get more convoluted from there, but most of the following levels are much more focused, tighter, and brighter. Also, you have a flashlight that you can use by pressing ‘F’ (for some reason this isn’t mentioned until the second level). Oh, and for the record, I liked the first level, but it’s not a good representation of the rest of the game.
Very fun and satisfying weapons, a good variety of enemies, and said enemies are used well in combination with each other, and placed cleverly around the environments.
It’s only 20 levels long and I beat it after a little more than six hours (though there are custom maps which at the moment houses some cut content), but I enjoyed the whole thing and definitely recommend it. It’s more than worth the $5 asking price.
I wish there were more levels using the outdoor aesthetic as it’s mostly Quake 2 style industrial designs, and there are a few levels I would consider filler (not bad levels, but very basic ones like Dead Simple) but overall, top notch stuff!
Oh, it’s also fairly easy on the standard difficulty, so true doom murder heads may want to kick it up a notch or two.
There is also a generous demo available if you want to try before you buy!
16 Likes
continuing on my long-lost PS1 games i always meant to play train, i’ve been playing through Alundra for the PS1.
i wasn’t sure how much this was going to resemble A Link to the Past, but so far it’s been a bit more akin to a late 16 bit/early 32 bit jrpg in terms of the higher emphasis on story and characters. i do like how much they want to you feel connected with the town, and there’s some good stuff in there about religion. it’s definitely far more developed than any Zelda game i can think of.
there are also small touches like this message that you get when you look into an empty chest that i appreciate (maybe because Nintendo would never do that):
i guess it has a bit of the Tim Rogers “hangout game” feel to it in the town. some of the dialogue is also either slightly darker or slightly sillier than you’d expect
hey man, don’t bro me if you don’t know me.
there are other aspects to this game that i’ve found a little bit puzzling though. instead of venturing all over the map like in Zelda, the map is really one contiguous place and you keep returning to the same village over and over. initially it was very confusing to tell where i needed to go because the game gives you no map or quest markers by default. instead what you have to do is go to the fortune teller in the town and pay her to tell you where to go, basically:
it’s a little strange, but certainly better than nothing.
the dungeons so far aren’t nearly as immediately captivating or varied as in Zelda, but there is a bigger emphasis on puzzles like this one which feel really Resident Evil/Silent Hill-esque.
but on the other hand it does feel like it deal with more “adult” themes like death and religion in the way a contemporary indie game in this mold might. and like i like the creepy psychic child aspect of the story:
overall the dungeons and game design isn’t blowing me away, and the map is a bit confusing and blends together way more than Zelda. but it also sort of feels like it’s trying to do something different enough from Zelda to where i’m interested enough in seeing the end. it’s sort of the opposite to Symphony of the Night to me where that game was extremely overstimulating in a way that was both very captivating and extremely annoying whereas this is mostly just chill thing i’m engaged just enough with to want to keep playing. i wish there was a bit more of that Zelda immediacy to it. but like i said there are elements that feel much more like a contemporary indie game to this than i really expected so that’s cool.
17 Likes
Rather than play any games I’ve spent the weekend trawling through my old harddrive for any tucked away game saves that I then put on the newer SSD. So far I’ve learned that some devs make some utterly insane choices when it comes to this, like many devs will dump their save files in the the hidden AppData folder but I found one game that dumped over three and a half Gb of random files in there that weren’t removed even if one deleted/uninstalled the game (like I did a couple years back). Most of the folders there are like 40kb in size so I assume that is the “intended” type of usage.
Also I am fully aware that I will never need 95+% of these saves but I played all those random itch games, I deserve to keep my meaningless clears. This is totally reasonable behavior I swear…
Oh yeah, I finally played a game on this new PC that I couldn’t before, the demo for this…
Turns out I kinda hate it 
TBF it is mostly because I do not understand why what I’m doing doesn’t work as the tutorial (that I think I may still be in) doesn’t let me know why my structures always fall down in the wrong direction, apparently it is a bit randomized and a bunch of the people on its discussion forum are particularly bothered by that. The gifs on the store page are still pretty though.
3 Likes
HAHA YES HAHAHA YES
Please play the Unworking Designs patch Vic Ireland hates you.
5 Likes
Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon (I’m just gonna call it Borigins) is something I really got attached to and found myself enjoying a lot more as it went on. It feels like it’s in the spirit of earlier Clover titles and as a result feels like Platinum’s freshest game for probably a decade. Its spirit is a mixture of 3D Zelda dungeon/world pleasantry with Kurikuri Mix. It is slightly longer than most Bayonetta games and is primarily appealing for simple aesthetic pleasures yet, I found it more compelling than anything I’ve played in that few years that wasn’t mostly carried by compulsive gameplay loops (Pokemon Violet, Like a Dragon, Reversi etc.). I’ll try and unpack it with some disjointed but lingering thoughts in this gigantapost.
Cereza (child Bayonetta) enters a magical cursed fairie forest after being told not to by her mentor. She has learned how to trap things, transform objects and the bare basics of demon summoning. She cannot do half of the things you can in Bayonetta games but you are still faced with fighting various faeries from Celtic and Arthurian folklore. The structure of the game is reminiscent of an interconnected Zelda dungeon (but not quite a Metroidvania, it isn’t really dense enough with secrets in my mind and movement through the world is very slow and measured). The closest analogue is Skyward Sword (wait, hear me out!) where it is meant to feel like a pseudo-open environment which clearly has Design running through its mostly organic forest environment.
Aesthetically its lavish and I realise this isn’t the strongest draw for many here, but everything is so dense with response. Polish metrics are on everything, and the juice slider is maxed. This isn’t so much me praising dopamine triggers as it is a recurrent sign that the game feels very creatively focused. The game really wants to give you the experience of a Carrol-esque Grimm fairytale adventure and you are going to feel it. This is not just the presence of 2D texture filters on everything to make it look like an illustrated book, it’s simply emphasising the joy of prodding a magical forest and being acknowledged.
The game starts off very rough gameplay wise as the syngergy between Cereza and her summoned demon Cheshire is deliberately absent. This is perhaps the game’s biggest tension, but it pays off well. As you progress you have to unlock 4 multi-coloured elemental cores (again, Zelda-esque) to find the mysterious fey boy that Cereza is trying to find to rescue her imprisoned mother. The cores are effectively the major ability upgrades that are applied to your demon and also serve as checkpoints in the mechanical and fictional development of the pair’s relationship. Eventually you unlock abilities that allow for the two to act off each other and that push you to master controlling a crowd control character and a damage-dealer simultaneously.
In the narrative, Cheshire and Cereza start off hating each other but this predictably softens as they encounter various difficulties. The game struggles to keep the tension of the uneasy friendship dynamic whilst also maintaining a steady combat improvement curve but mostly does it well. At its worst there are cases where a chapter has them argue violently and refuse to help one another temporarily, only for you to get to the upgrade screen where Cereza is telling Cheshire ‘good job! (b ᵔ▽ᵔ)b ‘ as he eats all the magical candy you’ve been stashing. And so often, gameplay wise, they love each other and get gradually better at co-operating meanwhile in the story they hate each other and regularly make each other cry.
There are 3(?) distinct stages of upgrade tier where the changes occur. This co-operation theme emerges very nicely through the animations that reflect these stages just when a particular character development pays off for the pair. The narrative and ability unlocks harmonise to make it feel like the journey isn’t just dramatic fluff – although it happens most successfully towards the final chapters/upgrade tiers. Musical changes at the upgrade screen that indicate strong, literal harmony between the two, or the animations which display warmer body language towards each other in contextual sections just seal the long-term progression as a total experience.
The aesthetic draw extends to the English voice cast which provide thorough output. There’s lots of interesting decisions here. The story is narrated by a woman with a crisp, mildly clipped British accent but she also voices Cheshire who is the only deeper voice across the whole voice cast. Although he’s meant to be a fearsome, selfish demon, his characterisation through the playfully deep voice of an elderly woman came to be an interesting imaginative tension where the story is and isn’t fully illustrated and acted for the player. Many of the voice actors are working in a similar range of both pitch and accent which contributes to the sense that the characters are all of one voice with the storyteller which I think triggered a strangely comforting sensation, at least as someone who was read to as a child. The very particular choices in the vocabulary also help keep a very straightforward story colourful.
Bayonetta 3 basically overshadowed this game which I think is a shame because Bayonetta 3 is kinda bad and Borigins imo does most things better than Bayonetta 3. Both attempt a more active role in demon summoning during combat whilst also simplifying base combat. There’s a lot of nuances but the crucial way in which Borigins succeeds over Bayo3 is it doesn’t require the player to:
- Manage two sets of character combos to be minimally effective against most large-scale encounters
- still grapple with direct camera control via the right stick
- grapple with a camera that regularly makes the player character functionally invisible
- hold a button(!) to keep the demon on the field
Borigins more naturally shares the control scheme between player and demon and ironically makes young Cereza’s demon synergy seem clearer than Bayo3’s bizarre dance between Bayonetta control, Demon control, and camera control. Borigins is also better at:
- Voice direction
- Art direction
- Music
- Mythological inspirations and consistency of theme in enemy and world design
- Plot/character development/stakes
- Side activities that aren’t infuriatingly finnicky
- Challenge rooms (that don’t fuck you over with unplayable environmental hazards like 3 does)
- Accessibility (particularly with regards to combat, Borigins is comparatively proud)
To be fair, Bayonetta 3 is better at:
- Weapon Variety
- Nothing
Here are some random good things about Borigins
- Witches cast magic through dance and Cereza is trained for this purpose, specifically in ballet. This is most likely a way of keeping the dance theme somewhat age-appropriate to the rating, but it fit well with the kinds of manoeuvres the game requires: staying in place while keeping time, spinning to change the environment, ending a careful, stable motion with an off-balance flourish to indicate success. Cereza is clumsy otherwise and the choice is nicer as a way of separating how she is as a person versus who she is practicing becoming. The upgrade points are also inexplicably shiny rocks because she requires a mirror to practice her dance.
- I’ve already written about how the metronome minigame for casting magic is really good. It legitimately never got old for me, and I just love doing it for its own sake.
- The music is always good. There’s a strong Celtic inspiration throughout and instrument voices are kept strong and clear, so they’re not lost in an orchestral mush. The full orchestra only gets reserved for very specific triumphs. The metronome minigame reveals that almost the entire game is composed in ¾ so there’s a playable, bouncy aspect to it that keeps the setting grounded in faerie mischief posing a danger to young wayward children. When the music syncs up with the polish metrics on the metronome and its effects - I am in bliss.
- The voice cast is REALLY excellent. The Game Awards can give all it’s best performances by a human to this game and then fuck off since it won’t nominate the game for anything.
- The game indicates the main path through the story goal of following a white wolf related to the faerie boy. This is represented visually by neon blue footprints that point to the ‘right way’ in the environment. It’s not that annoying as a waypoint marker since it mainly clarifies direction than provides a literal trail to follow (you only have at most 4 directions to go at any one point anyway). It is most handy in telling you what is actually optional or not as you progress.
Here are some random good things that are spoilers
- For each of the 4 elemental cores there are a couple of level sections you have to do before getting to it. This is the meat of the game’s progression – a few mini dungeons for each core. At one point, before the final elemental core, you and Cheshire have a proper falling out and Cheshire just leaves. You play as Cereza alone and the game naturally starts to break apart because you literally can’t do combat. The level you subsequently play through is mostly linear because your lack of powers means all the routes are closed. Once you eventually reunite with Cheshire you can go back to this area and play almost an entire level section ‘normally’ as if there were a predestined path for them to get through had they not fell out. I really like this kinda meta-level design that acknowledges how things could go even if they didn’t the first time; no other return path in the game is this large.
- Occasional musical callbacks to other Bayonetta games happen and they’re mostly done quite well, obscured under smart arrangements that suppress the energy of the more action-oriented main game versions. Fly Me to the Moon returns several times but is sung without polish as a child might. How the lyrics of the song are reconciled in what is presumably middle-ages England is unknown.
- You fight one of the basic angels – Affinity (or at least the fey illusion of one) as a bossfight and it’s a good moment because it helps again to emphasise how powerful Bayonetta is at different points. Angels are basically superhuman fighters and it’s framed as you having no hope against an otherwise fodder enemy in the series but you overcome it after much effort.
- You fight the Jabberwock and the fight pushes fixed camera angles in a way I’ve not seen a game do before.
- Once you unlock the final area (an enchanted faerie prison) the designers thought an interesting transition would be to have a brief minigame where Cereza and Cheshire can free fall down a pit while popping mystical bubbles. The bubbles confer no benefit like exp or other rewards and they are seemingly there just because it makes the area feel different and is a nice interaction that gives the space a sense of mystery. Nothing like it happens anywhere else in the game and it’s a great moment that, again, betrays a bolder creative direction pushing it along.
- Cereza saves Cheshire by cutting most of her hair off at one point since hair conducts magic for demonic summoning. She retains a new haircut for the rest of the game and Cheshire gets a little hair bandage. Cereza does so in direct disobedience of her master foreshadowing their eventual conflict and Cheshire is forced to visually admit vulnerability which was a cause of most of the arguments about who is the stronger in their symbiotic relationship. Best haircut-based character development since FFIX or Yakuza 7.
Here’s a list of annoying stuff you'll probably hate but which I mostly overlooked because I secretly like most of these things. The game is not perfect and ymmv since I tend to irrationally tolerate stuff when I love other things in a game.
- Cereza’s voice can reach shrill peaks which I think many will find irritating. I didn’t mind it since it contrasts so nicely with adult Bayonetta’s otherwise smug, self-assured and controlled tone. Cereza is not in control of most situations and is much more emotionally swayed by short-term problems or surprises which comes through in the voice. The performance shows good range and I like it even though many hate whiny child voices in media.
- The map is intentionally(?) misleading which makes backtracking more annoying than it needs to be. The logic is that the woods are a Lost Woods kinda deal so finding your way isn’t really meant to be possible without help. The map screen is fine within a small area but there’s no way to know if the exit to one area leads to another except to make a mental or physical note. Level maps are fine but the overworld map is wildly unreliable as you cannot tell if an area connects to another one since even adjacent portions of the map don’t actually link up. This only becomes a problem if you want to do a lot of optional stuff or 100% the game but still feels like an unnecessary problem
- The game has areas of the map called Tír na nÓg which are somewhat repetitive to go through as a routine. They are how you uncover map fog and effectively act as pocket dimensions for arenas and puzzles. I didn’t mind it so much because I love how they look and sound. Each Tír na nÓg involves the same routine of little transitional actions/cutscenes:
o Opening the Tír na nÓg
o Waking up inside it
o Opening the door to the arena/puzzle area within
o Doing the arena/puzzle
o Collecting a chest with unskippable chest animation and Zelda jingle
o Walking up some stairs and along a bridge
o Destroying a weird crystal to destroy the Tír na nÓg
o Waking up back in the forest
Every time. - The time trials, which are just the Tír na nÓg again, aren’t appealing as it boils down to doing puzzles quickly.
- Cereza’s spell targeting is very fussy and I feel like this could’ve been tweaked to that she doesn’t have to be facing the exact direction an enemy is relative to her. Just a weird oversight in a game where targeting is otherwise very generous.
The very final segment of the game is a masterclass in genre-shifting. The game has basically been leading up to Cereza synchronising more and more with Cheshire through combat through a fixed camera, dual-character control frame (Left-side controller:Cereza, Right-side controller:Cheshire). You find that the faerie boy who was calling to you actually needs you to sacrifice your demon to him to escape faerie prison; it was summoned on a bissextile night after all. Fuck that shit, and so you have a bossfight where he sucks the elemental cores away from you and you fight to get them back. It’s basically a roll call of your abilities. It ends with you getting all the cores and transitioning to you riding Cheshire and the control scheme shifts. You can now properly dodge a la Bayonetta with the right trigger (previously an optional dodge on L3 and R3 which you never needed that badly). Since you’re fighting a much quicker enemy the new Bayonetta dodge becomes necessary.
When elemental cores first introduced, I found it strange that they’re mapped to the face buttons although it’s still in-keeping with the bilateral controller split since the right side belongs to Cheshire and he is the elemental conduit. You barely ever pressed them since you’re just selecting which element you want but they slowly creep into combat in a key way. During this final boss fight the core inputs come in to now form attacks in a more conventional face-button combat layout. It is such a subtle statement of how the player experience shifts with the characters’ growth.
So we beat up faerie boy and escape the forest in a Bayonetta-esque on-rails segment which mostly acts as a series staple. Our master, it turns out, is the real final boss – a far more experienced witch. She sent us to rescue her son (faerie boy), it turns out we’re one of many junior witches who went in (the witch corpses we find around the forest don’t seem so odd now). The full Bayonetta control scheme is essentially activated by this final fight where your former master summons an extremely powerful spider demon and pushes our new dodge and attack to their limit. We unlock witch time halfway through the fight (in the final 1% of the game) and can now more reasonably manage the onslaught of attacks. This final fight also takes place in a totally open arena unlike the more top-down orientation of the rest of the game. The camera is much freer but the game basically handles lock-on for us for this much larger boss (Bayonetta 3 please note) so we are free to focus on newly acquired abilities. The game has climaxed into a rough primordial facsimile of Bayonetta gameplay but still has a foot in the language of Borigins to keep the transition clear. We even do full Bayonetta QTEs that bosses throughout the game have foreshadowed with mini versions of.
This attention to detail in how a prequel justifies its successors mechanically is one more bit of evidence that the game had really strong creative direction. I was hooked from earlier character investment even though the story amounts to a very simple fairytale about friendship and the final sequence just hit it out of the park for me. The presentation and confidence of its creative vision is hard to deny.
Another neat little nod
The 4 elements become 4 jewels that attach to Cheshire’s final form and ultimately…
It’s not much, and the game doesn’t explicitly highlight this connection, but someone took the trouble.
Looking forward to 100%ing and doing post-game stuff. I really liked this one.
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