Hmmmmmmmm Shu Takumi was temporarily freed from his Ace Attorney golden cage to do this experiment, so it does feel like a fresh new direction for his team, with great side 2D backdrops and animations on top of the usual great art / sound design
But the compelling case solving is replaced by very weak Rube Goldberg machines to solve and these are very unsatisfying for a million of reasons (which objects can be possessed is arbitrary, you get constantly interrupted, there’s lots of waiting and restarting, it’s just about trying everything until something works and not stimulating at all, etc) so they always feel like nadirs as opposed to Ace Attorney’s climaxes.
And since the game requires no active participation in the story to progress, I’m engaging with the writing much more passively than I would with Ace Attorney, and it’s just not that gripping on its own.
Also it’s, uh, kind of weird how all the good/neutral characters are white and all the antagonists have another skin color. There’s only one « neutral » character with the Bad Guy Skin Color, and the protagonist remarks on how suspicious he seems. I’m about halfway through the game, 6-7 hours in and the game has done nothing to dispel this. I want to google « is Ghost trick accidentally extremely racist » but don’t want to be spoiled
I think the blue-skinned characters are all (sort of a spoiler you may already be aware of, but just in case) supposed to be weird foreign nationals trying to obtain the MacGuffin of the story to advance their nation, and not too much more than that?
Unless I horribly misinterpreted it (and I very well could have!), it seems like a deeply unfortunate visual shorthand akin to how South Park does their Canadians.
really sucks that a game that’s otherwise as fun and beautiful as snk vs capcom cardfighters clash 2 is has a sudden trans panic “joke” included, that the player character takes part in, whether you want them to or not.
Much like the other game of the year Armo(u)red Core VI, Touhou: Undefined Dream Of Living Ghost on a macro level feels like a two steps forward one step back for the series, modernising a lot of the mechanics in interest of “fairness” and adding more option in a Density sense rather than a Destiny sense. I like a lot of this, enough to 1CC every character on easy to unlock all of them before going to higher rankings but the choice to fix how many arcades you go against is, while mechanically obvious, very missive of a lot of fun of Touhou’s 3 and 9 having lunatic matches operate like a tennis game rather than the chess boxing dynamic shown here. CPU 1V1s bypass this but not giving a classic option is a big mistake.
Has the best Stage 1 theme of the entire franchise.
I could never click with the game back on the DS and you’re making me realize this might be why. Also I think it felt too much like a puzzle game I’d play in a browser, like on newgrounds, and then forget about
The following level has another good version of that, when you find the boyfriend’s photograph. Definitely a game that they spent time making sure was exactly as long as it needed to be, even if it felt like it was missing a level where you had to pack items up after a family member passed away.
had to take my mind off of things, so i tried out the new strive update and played in the parks because fuck the tower. i appreciate that after all this time, arcsys finally added testament to the game.
seriously the new way the game handles rank is fucking stupid and makes me mad and not play the game for three months. going from celestial all the way down to floor 7 in an hour because you went 1-2 in a set after winning 10 times in a row is fucked.
I checked and I started this on November 9th, which is definitely not 28 days ago. Lies surround us.
I was right and there were four more rooms left on this floor. I quit yesterday on a tar/mud/gel room but it was one where there were no mothers to make it grow, so it was not much of a pain. Of course the last room on the floor for me ended up being one with all three of them growing, a fitting way to end this (this was not intentional, if I took a left instead of a right to start it would have been done second). Got a whole bunch of builders on the right side and a giant concrete mass with various enemies and mud/tar/gels imbedded in it that is gradually disassembled by said builders, except you need to manage the mud and tar to prevent it from growing to quick early on or it’ll be too much for you to keep atop of. I think the trick was to make it so that certain things pinned each other down to also prevent this, either way I got it on my second real attempt. This opened up the staircase beyond, with my nephew (who was working with the empire to slow me down) begging me not to continue as I’d be killed.
Turns out this was the last floor BTW, I doubt anyone cares for spoilers at this point but this is your polite heads-up.
You reach the lowest point, saying how you finally want answers. You enter a place with a single falling tile, you step on it then let it fall and upon gazing at what’s below you exclaim this can’t be real, wandering away absolutely stunned at what you see. If you’ve ever seen a screenshot of DROD (beyond my cropped avatar) you know it is a fairly basic looking 2d top down view game. As the player character walks away a window pops up of the game screen you were just looking at, gradually zooming into that one gap left by the fallen tile. It zooms in and is revealsed to be a 3d polygonal hole going further and further down. The dark view twists until a splash of light emerges and you are now zooming around a fully polygonal surface world, very basic polygons but still. The camera zooms around for a minute or so before turning to the blue sky and flying off as it fades to black. A note tells us that Beethro’s adventures will continue in a few year’s time in DROD: The Second Sky~
(It came out 7 years later; it has been 9 years since then with no official new entry announced, Maybe I’ll get to it around 2028).
In comparison my friend who picked up the game after dropping it midway several years back had about 15k more moves with around 6k less kills (and about an hour longer completion time). I chalk up the moves difference to him not playing the first half of the game with unlimited undo; do not play this game without unlimited undo. The bigger difference is matched against fried of the forum mauve who had 50k less moves and more than 10k fewer kills, oh yeah and also finished in 11 fewer hours. You know how I complained about the grindy “war of attrition” rooms? Part of that may simply be due to me clearly being much less efficient at them than your average DROD player.
Anyways that’s it, I beat the final of the 4 original DROD games, a notoriously difficult game (which TBF would be markedly more true with its original no undo only occasional checkpoint tiles system in places) and I didn’t have to look up help once. Did I find every secret, which was needed to unlock a hidden bonus stage? No… but that was never gonna happen. I consider this a clear, full win, and a monkey off my back.
yeah i finished the game, the platforming really pissed me off, the game mechanics had very little to do with the themes i thought
also re-finished WHAT THE GOLF, the new episode, that game still makes me laugh somehow. one of the few games i’ve seen do slapstick well
finished the first part of HOW FISH IS MADE i thought it kind of failed to deliver on the promise of saying anything interesting and not just vaguebooking about the nature of choice, it really should have been more specific with what it was trying to do, shame because i loved the aesthetic and dialogue to start
contrastingly, i tried to play POST VOID on a controller it just made my eyes hurt. that garish flashing technicolor thing doesn’t do it for me. and related to that i bounced off ANTICHAMBER again i always get headaches if i look at that game too long
played some SUPER MEGA BASEBALL 3 and really enjoying the gameplay of it, i thought it would be a nothing game but the gameplay is really satisfying. i made a custom team of all girls and have quickly grown attached to (some of) them
in that vein of surprisingly good arcade-ish but actually sim-ish sports games, interested to try out ART OF RALLY. in general i’m not into sports games anymore unless i can make my character a girl, but i guess art of rally there is no character… or is there
Ive been playing a day here and there in Friends of Ringo Ishikawa and I keep forgetting where my arubaito is located lmfao
game’s amazing. this is my second playthru and it hits so hard. im going to replay Arrest of a Stone Buddha after this and then pick up Fading Afternoon.
I am sick so finally sat down with Void Stranger. Feel I may just put this to aside at floor 136. I checked the spoilers in the thread and while they made me go “oh” the pure sicko depth of sokoban (a genre I do not like) isn’t gonna keep me for the supposed 40 hours.
It’s a cool thing and I am glad they made a full sicko game in response to minor but vocal celebration of ZeroRanger.
Nearing the end of Detention. God, what an experience with this whole thing is. Makes me excited to finally fire up Devotion, once I work up the courage.
hasn’t played Legacy Of Lunatic Kingdom or Hidden Star In Four Seasons