Frankly, Uematsu is kind of phoning it in too in Fantasian
I trudged through the early parts and surprisingly, Fantasian actually gets good 20 hours in!? (Not suggesting it’s worth it though)
Fantasian has the same structure as FF6, with an on-rails first part, and a non-linear second part where you have to gather the whole crew again.
And if the first half of Fantasian is the FF6 World of Balance if you never cared about anything happening and everything felt kinda worse, the second half of Fantasian is the FF6 World of Ruin if it felt good, was much longer, and you had to really delve into the mechanics since every boss required effort. There’s a lot more agency given to the player compared to part 1, difficulty ramps up hard and cutscenes are toned way down.
It’s good. I’m voluntarily talking to the NPCs to get a little more dialogue, which would have been unimaginable in part 1.
Now, with the original release of Fantasian, people had to wait X months to play the second part of the game, and were immediately thrown into this open ended Hard Mode Romhack, so I get why everybody dropped it. Plus I just can’t see the people who enjoyed the slop that is Fantasian part 1 (no offense) generally being able to enjoy part 2. Similarly the people who could have enjoyed part 2 generally would not have gotten past part 1. The audiences are incompatible. (I only got that far because of the dioramas) Which is why nobody talked about part 2 at release.
The world change only worked in FF6 because the game was more elegant
A lot of the fantasian music didn’t work for me except the cinderella tri-stars which has been a real earworm for me for like three years that I can’t get rid of.
I’m in the place now (especially after feeling spent by Metaphor’s runtime) where I feel like there’s other RPGs more deserving of a look, even just from a historical perspective. Like ever since Chrono Trigger wrapped up in around 20-25 hours, every year since has meant there’s less and less excuse to not put your best foot forward with the good stuff. I guess the Apple Arcade audience didn’t have much else similar on the platform back then. I wish I could skip the 20 hours.
I agree about the Uematsu too. It’s recognisably his but forgettable.
good: the music continues to impress. i’ve started to encounter a few pseudo-novel ideas. the world design is pretty cool - nicely layered. i like the tiny little markings on the manual and what those imply.
bad: the combat is absolute dogshit. irredeemable trash. what an irritating way to anchor your core gameplay loop! ugh. probably a bit too much of the game is “walk behind the isometric scenery” stuff. i don’t hate that in theory, exactly, but it wears thin as it starts feeling like over-reliance
feeling like i’m probably halfway thru, maybe a bit more. seen a lot of weird shit now that i’ve picked up on some undocumented stuff you can do. i’m hoping there are some more cool ideas w/r/t the non-combat elements of the game, because holy shit…
Not being able to play the cool dress-up game, I’m still making my own fun with Fashion Dreamer. Among other things this means trying to create costumes for my off-brand Athena Asamiya from KOF.
While there isn’t quite enough stuff to create a 100% game-accurate look, between all of her canon costumes and her idol persona, you don’t need to do much to give her something that looks like what she’d wear.
merry christmas, i’ve been made aware that 1) there was a pc port of tony hawk’s american wasteland and 2) it has been modded to hell and back to include a ton of stuff, including seemingly every character neversoft has even looked at. and i mean everybody.
System Shock (2023): as far as I can tell, Nightdive is the only company even remotely qualified to do these remakes. I guess there are changes to the original that might be considered stepping too far over the line from “modernization” to “quality of life (derogatory)”, but they’re all so minor, and the important thing is still there: the game is a dungeon crawl that expects you to be a grownup about figuring out what it is you’re supposed to do. I love that there is no objective list anywhere. You just have to keep track of what you’ve seen and what people tell you. And really, it’s all buried in your media if you take a minute and go looking for it. But you might have to remember a name, or a weird monitor you saw that didn’t make sense at the time, or put 2 and 2 together without anyone telling you to do so. It also keeps the spirit of the original alive by its intense greebling; figuring out what is interactive and what isn’t is a huge part of coming to know the station and its quirks. Starting out it seems like an impenetrable maze, and then after a while you start to know certain levels like the back of your hand, and the way it’s put together starts to make high-level sense. This is fantastic dungeon design, and it’s one step away from a pure adventure game.
Really makes me hope they do SS2 with the same gumption. Who knows, they could actually make that one (heavily flawed and worse than the first game) a full fledged improvement.
decided to use some o that sweet overtime $ to buy a vidya game in the first time in forever for christmas day which led to me ultimately refunding Air Twister after 5 or 6 levels because my income is not that disposable…just very mid feeling to move around and shoot, not enough snap and pop for my liking and the pill-shaped bullet dodging depth perception mushy and apathy inducing for me personally and shouldn’t she skim splash the water when you’re at the bottom of the screen even though the perspective of it might not make total real world sense but this is a video game and we deserve such interactive flourishes!? when the Queen-pastiche hit my ears immediately at the start screen I felt something…and then stared at the screen and it’s static and lifeless not even the highlighted Start button pulses or glows and shouldn’t we have an animated vista in the background there or best case scenario a music video montage? a sign of things to come as I just kept thinking how so much can be done with rail shooters that isn’t and you sure do listen to a lot of Queen-pastiche…
finished Indiana Jones. The final boss fight was hilarious, the Nazi antagonist does a big reveal that he “knows karate” and starts doing these ridiculous crane kicks at you that are extremely easy to dodge, then there’s a second phase of the fight where you’re both hanging off the side of a ship and you have to kick him to death while swinging back and forth on your whip. I stand by my initial impression that the larger levels (there are 3 in total that are relatively open and have side quests in addition to 4 that are linear and like 30 minutes long) aren’t quite as good after the first one at the Vatican – basically anything in the game that was challenging to the point of needing to be retried, platforming/stealth/combat, was not great, but the densest level design, the puzzles, the big “wow I didn’t realize the engine could do that” action movie setpieces, and the storytelling were tons of fun. I would say it’s right on the side of inessential but I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would, and the first 4-5 hours are extremely great in an “oh they haven’t really shipped one of these at this budget since the middle of the PS4’s lifespan” way.
the PC Gamer review pretty much said the same thing but it’s very “understood the assignment” – it keeps the uncharted bits and the Zelda puzzles to a necessary minimum and the first person perspective really makes the whole thing.
oh and I also finished miles morales finally in anticipation of the last one coming out on PC next month… these games are such good AAA bullshit. the combat manages to be both busy and satisfying without being too tedious, the story beats are like PBS-special levels of wholesome but the characters are good enough to actually sell it, and the busywork is very well integrated and ignorable
im playing that gnorp idle game because i heard it ends (thanks @VastleCania !!) and i already have a cookie clicker save so i dont need to play any other idle games that dont end. and like the only other one ive played that ends is spaceplan. its a desire i have that is not often met
its about hiring little dudes to hit a rock harder and harder so it jizzes particles, then picking up those particles and using them as currency. when the particles get too high because your collectors arent getting htem fast enough they condense down and its harder to get them high again. theres all sorts of little things about like hitting the rock hard enough that the rock jizz flies into the feeder without little runners having to go and pick it up. my favorite guys are the mountain climbers who climb to the top of high piles of particles and shovel them closer to the feeder. its cute.
i left it on overnight and i already got multiple colors of jizz (every time the rock compresses you get another color for your particle porn). excited to see where it goes. i guess im only into deckbuilding when its an idle game cuz there are a lot of synergies and builds i can see forming
This isn’t the first time they did something similar. Sometime after launch they replaced every instance of the word “Jawbreaker” with “Jawdestroyer”, presumably due to copyright.
perhaps they’re saving “buy” for a future premium currency
Nearly finished with Rise of the Golden Idol. Which is maintaining the intricate complexity of the previous games’ DLC chapters. And in just the same way this one is kind of tiring me out. The plot is also less compelling and way more opaque than the family feud that span the entirety of the first game, and kept you grounded with dramatic twists and murders. There are actually very few murders, let alone deaths, in this sequel at all. Maybe that’s an artifact of Obra Dinn, but I really liked starting a new chapter in the first game and being presented with a cold-opening onto someone’s body being exploded or combusted out of nowhere. It was kind of scary! Rise is just quirky.
It’s still fun and I’m not done yet. Also, there is one chapter where you are interpreting a dance in motion, which was really cool to me.
I didn’t like the dlc chapters of the first golden idol game, they felt like the developers didn’t understand what was appealing about the early chapters (aristocrats getting violently exploded and figuring out the chain of events that resulted in that) and instead thought we were playing these games for the barely reconstructed colonial fantasy
Got both ender lilies and R-type final 2 for switch on sale. both have some damage sponge bosses and i gotta wonder why anybody ever thought of that as good design
maybe I’m just getting old but I feel like the megaman x and zero games had boss fights of the ideal length.
I am sure some of that is going to appear in the last chapter, but so far Rise has very little to do with the colonial adventure from the first game. It’s there in the background as new age spiritualism in the 70s and like mind control research are part of the plot in this one, but when you see Lemuria or Lanka written down somewhere it’s like “woah! what a throwback!!” instead of an active part of the story you are piecing together. But loose ends do tend to find themselves tied together in conclusions, so we’ll see…
FINALLY (I love christmas vacation), I am also playing Rift Apart, the PS5 ratchet and clank game (very nice that they port all their exclusives to PC now and also nice that I have time to play a game like this without feeling like I have better things to do) and it’s really good in a sort of Doom Eternal 4 Kids way? they ration ammo so you have to switch up your tactics constantly but you also have a growing collection of like 2 dozen guns and the combat is fun and frantic without having anything to prove (also like spiderman, I think this is a Sony house rule now). I think I played an hour of one of these on the PS2 20 years ago, and then another hour of the PS4 one that they gave away for free during the pandemic, and neither did anything for me, so I am inclined to say that this is made meaningfully better by modern technology that makes it resemble a Pixar movie that can introduce new mechanics and new environments at breakneck speed.
both this and Jedi Survivor (the 2nd one) have open world platformer design in a way that I can’t recall having seen in a while, and they both make it work by focusing on combat + traversal + bright colors… it’s a good micro design trend that I all but missed out on imo
