Great posts everybody. I’m thinking it’s going to be Dragon Quarter followed by Mark of Kri.
Also i will probably not dip outside of the list i’ve put up here anytime soon, because i already own way too many games. but don’t let that stop y’all from continuing to talk about good old PS2 games.
I was tempted by yarusenai’s thread but ultimately didn’t have enough conviction. Glad someone who did snapped it up!
I have a copy of Nocturne that i’ve beaten, twice. it’s one of my most treasured possessions. Actually i bought it from a selectbuttoner years ago, though i forget who it was. They sold it to me real cheap at a time when it was not real cheap. Thanks again whoever you are!!
Holy shit am I enjoying the first Maximo game. Are there other games like this? The difficulty and the punishing progression system coupled with the long attack animations with no possibility to cancel legitimately remind me of the Souls series. I accidentally entered the 4th level from the hubworld (none of this stuff is spelled out for you) and had to complete it before running out of death tokens to return to the hub world in order to spend 100 hard-won coins just to save my damn game (or else restart from the very beginning again). Newer games with any sort of mass-appeal potential are pretty much entirely unwilling to make these kinds of punishing progression design decisions, but they mean so much in terms of satisfaction for the player. The risk of frustration is high, but the payoff is usually worth it.
Still chugging through Maximo: Ghosts to Glory. The more I play the more I am impressed by it. Every enemy has characteristics that require a different combat approach, so even with less than a dozen enemy types (could be more, maybe less), each encounter feels weighty and meaningful. Button mashing will get you annihilated as there are bomb-wielding enemies that explode when attacked normally, shield-bearers who block your attacks effectively, pirates who cannot be finished without taking damage except when struck first from behind, ice-blocked enemies that can only be felled with magic or vertical strikes or thrusts (but will pinball away when using a finisher), the list goes on. This game is the ideal version of so many action-platformers. The use of the classic GnG theme as fundamental and ubiquitous motif is pretty interesting, too, from a musical perspective.
It’s on PSN for 10bux which is more than worth it. I played it some back in the day and meauxdal is pretty spot on about what made it so good. It was a “souls-like” 4 or 5 years before that became a term people used to describe a game.
There was a sequel made that I never played called Army of Zin that I read was easier (and probably therefore less interesting/rewarding). Ghosts to Glory is good though. Basically a 3D Ghosts 'n Goblins.
I recall Maximo having somewhat janky feeling jumps which was… not ideal for a platformer, but it’s been so many years. All I know is that I never made it beyond the first few levels and Ghosts 'n Goblins is one of my favorite NES games.
Also I never actually figured out how one was supposed to save in that game.
I can’t say agree re: Maximo’s jumping physics. To me, they feel very limited but powerful. Setpieces frequently enforce good timing with your double jumps, and I like that you can maximize horizontal movement well, but vertically you’re quite restricted. It gives scaling some of the architecture (you can do this in most of the levels for secret-hunting purposes) a more rewarding feeling.
It’s also great that you can begin your first jump after falling, giving you a kind of triple-jump: fall off the ledge moving forward, then initiate the first jump at maximum rate of descent, then the second jump at the same time in the second arc. Feels good. (They specifically require you to do this for a few secrets, otherwise I wouldn’t have known you could do it.)
The game doesn’t really show its hand until you’ve gotten to the first hubworld and poked around. There are a lot of little things (saving, for one; also using checkpoints) that you probably won’t realize right off the bat without reading the manual that can be incredibly punishing to new players. Stick with it. It’s a fucking gem.
The biggest issue regarding the platforming is not with the jumping physics; those are nuanced and passable even if not to everyone’s taste. No, the real issue is the goddamn PS2-era camera. That shit is almost without question the biggest flaw in the game.
You’re liable to spend 3-5 seconds before every platforming setpiece to readjust the camera, and the camera-foward button is one of the only, if not the only action in the game that can be cancelled, which is… absolutely absurd, tbh
Making good progress in Sky Odyssey. Once you get better at flying, replaying earlier missions to gain a higher grade is addicting. You definitely get that “one more attempt” feeling in this game. The music is ironically one of the least pleasurable things about this game, despite being composed by Kow Otani of Shadow of the Colossus fame. There are some nice melodies, but they are continually marred by low sample quality and flat, tinny timbres. The mood-setting still works, though, it’s just not as aurally glorious as it maybe should be.
I am very interested in playing either Dark Cloud 2 or Rogue Galaxy on my PS4. They look pretty gorgeous, but I’m not sure which one I should play. Help?
Both of these games are really interesting and similar in art direction…but Dark Cloud 2 has town building, fishing, and lets you go golfing in dungeons.
I never beat Dark Cloud 2, but I did put probably 30 hours in it when it came out. It was a really cool game. Certainly gorgeous. Quite weird. you spend a lot of your time building things, a lot more of your time inventing things, some of your time dungeon crawling, some of your time fishing while dungeon crawling, and god knows what else I’ve forgotten. it was a very evocative game, too, which is to say the visuals never felt like they were wasted on something that didn’t know what to do with them.
Yeah Dark Cloud 2 is a lot of fun and probably Level 5’s best game besides Dragon Quest 8. It’s sort of a monument to excess, but you can ignore a lot of the side stuff if you just want a reasonably fun dungeon crawler with a neat Vagrant Story-esque weapon upgrade system (albeit much simpler and more forgiving). Though i’d be remiss if i didn’t mention that it is a game where you can beat a randomized dungeon floor, then play a golfing minigame on that floor to win bonus prizes.
It’s also got a dumb but enjoyable Saturday morning cartoon plot that, again, you can mostly ignore.
Double jumping and then using the strong attack (▲) will do a downward striking attack (I refer to this move as a “finisher”, since it’s vital to finish off downed enemies). This is also how you extract all of the blue fairies from “haunted” tombstones and other blue-glowy structures.
Here’s a tip, though: don’t rely on checkpoints. Losing more than a few lives is generally grounds to reload your save, unless you want to be charged a ridiculous amount of death tokens to continue late-game (this happened to me, which means I need to go grind easier levels for extra lives and such).