grandia 2 rules, ive been eyeing that HD collection so i can play it again, and also ive never played the first grandia
i hate 3 though
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2 really is the one people seem to have actually played, availability on DC/PS2 especially for that era, maybe compelling cover art for jrpg seekers. It’s so much more grimdark tropey than your average and imo remains one of the crests for that kind of thing.
It’s still solid and enjoyable due to one of the best battle systems ever, but other highlights for me were Teo and maybe Iwadare’s best battle theme after Lunar 2’s (mega cd arranged ONLY).
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The attitude and world design in 1 though are a lot more charming, the cliche overarc carries Justin through an extremely, “see the world’s history but also mature yourself foo” tale.
iirc 3 did manage to one up combat even further so that was awesome, a few things in Xenoblade like Break->Topple kinda echoed it and are part of why I like both systems so much. Otherwise it was so extremely amalgam by numbers I couldn’t press on after the first few hours.
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Goose Horn City
…
Game I dreamt I played last night:
Sekiro, but with Okami’s cel-shading and general art direction, with a mashup of Guwange and Vasara’s soundtracks
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Grandia Xtreme
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Being, seemingly very dungeon crawler rogue, mmo???ish I was actively uninterested but on the account of VA, gonna need to hear some.
my chief memory of Grandia 2 is getting to the final boss on my first playthrough and then killing it without it ever getting an attack off because I kept chaining cancels
I was going to shitpost a Langrisser 2 track but why do that when I can just point to Purification of Darkness
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A lotta Langrisser rocks and then sometimes melds into how I want to hear more Sakuraba arranged.
Pfffft of Darkness, here’s the supreme, similar drum rolling drive
I can still hear the menu’s pop-in sound, where the strings start welling up around 1:16 and it’s hype as shit.
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Creature in the Well is pretty shallow, but it’s a fairly novel concept – a hack ‘n’ slash pinball hybrid of sorts. It’s got some style too, although the music is completely forgettable.
I like it, but it’s the rare 2-hour-long game that’d be better if it was shorter.
i take back everything negative ive ever said about dark souls this game looks fucking awesome
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my favourite part about that area is the disorientation from falling through holes in the floor while the camera is still locked onto the person above you
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What I find most irksome is the almost completely superfluous loot/gear/upgrade system, but mostly because I feel like the devs must have felt forced to do it.
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my PSO2 beta experience: the server went up, filled up, Sega added another ship, both ships went down, the game was offline for 4 hours, then the servers went up and the game worked
also they’re playing the Sonic movie trailer in the lobby
I can’t wait to throw money at this shit
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so anyway, while PSO2 spent the first 5 hours of its official Western life not working, I had to kill time
(I sound bitter but actually I’m giddy as shit that America still has red box lust in 2020)
so, on the Xbone, even for free to play games, you need a Live sub. and getting 3 months of Game Pass Ultimate was cheaper than one month of Live Gold. so!
Children of Morta is a good game, though I am weary of the idea that a chunk of the power progression is tied to leveling up all the family members that can delve. also it’s a goddamn shame that the game’s nice mix of pixel and hand-painted art gets fucked with a lot from constant shimmering on assets from panning and scaling
as proof of how little I was paying attention, you wouldn’t know the game is from Iran (though IIRC not all of the devs are physically in the country), where there’s little in the way of official access to what’s commonly considered the canon of gaming; the game very naturally slides in alongside its Western contemporaries. it’s a well considered and thoughtfully designed product.
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My relatively peaceful days in The Forest continued, probably in large part simply due to avoiding any significant encounters with the cannibals. Slap enough lizard skin with leaves stuck on to them to you and I guess they pay little attention to the walking bush with an axe, at least further away. So other than a surprisingly lone jerk (generally at that point they had been running around in groups of 3-5) who started some shit late one evening just as I was about to go behind the walls for the day and got his ass set on fire for his trouble, things had been quiet. Though my place was still being scoped out, having spotted some from a distance milling about when I was coming back from elsewhere and at one point while I was doing stuff inside the walls I heard some hanging around so I kept quiet and they went on their way.
Using my raft to scope out the full coastline of this peninsula, and since on the opposite side from where I was was an old yacht I off shore I could sleep in I was gone a couple of days and this seemed to de-escalate things further, as when I returned home there were no effigies placed immediately around my base, just a few in some usual spots that were already in use when I arrived.
But peace would not last. I tired of sleeping on the dirt in a shanty, so it was time to build a real cabin. But that would mean lots of wood, which would mean pissed of cannibals. But I decided to find a spot further away to harvest than my immediate surroundings, in part just to see if things would stay quiet at home, but also to conduct another experiment. Since I would travel by raft as it was safer than going long distance overland as cannibals and mutants can’t swim and the nearest shore where my raft sat is a hotbed of cannibal patrols, to help secure things there when I have to haul log sled from the raft back to base I decided to build a wall at a narrow point between the water and a cliff which separates the shore from further inland for a good stretch at that point, and also simply to see what would happen to the patrols when the route is blocked.
For a few days things are fairly normal as I slowly built the wall and made my lumber runs, moving logs from cutting site to boat to home and gathering rocks on the ways to build the wall slowly, sometimes sleeping away from home at camp on small island just across from where I was cutting. Then it seemed my work was getting noticed, as I started spying patrols on the shore by the cutting site, having not seen any before being part of why I was doing it there. And I don’t know if it was the still incomplete wall or the tree cutting, but after another day or two all hell broke loose. As I get back near my home shore and start moving logs onto the log sled from my raft, I pause for two criss-crossing cannibal patrols, but then I spot two full fledged mutants stomping around too, and I haven’t seem any of those nasty bastards above ground in some time. Tactically retreating back to the water I go back to the island camp to try again later. For the next few days every time I came back, and even on the way there was all sorts of cannibals and mutants stomping around, in particular often a pair of mutants hanging around right near where the cliff ends and I have to move my log sled through to get home, as if they were waiting for me.
Though in one way the mutants were kind of welcome, they’re much slower when roaming around than cannibals and make a lot of noise, so you always know when one is around unlike the cannibals on their own who love cardio and run everywhere and rarely make too much sound until they’ve spotted you, so at least I didn’t have to be looking over my shoulder as much.
And then I completed my wall on the beach, and soon got to observe the results, as a patrol ran up to it, stopped and looked around, and finding no path turned and ran off. And I had mused given the geography when building that the wall might just increase traffic near my house if they actually circumnavigate it, and sure enough when I got home a couple minutes later, I spy at the edge of the woods what appeared by number and composition to be that same group from the beach, though it meant they took a less troublesome for me route than I was fearing. And I haven’t seen any sign of shore patrols coming from the east anymore, so however they’re getting around has been completely out of my sight.
But while I was still cutting, suddenly things calm down again. No unusually large groups or mutants en masse, though I have heard a few nearby. And then the evening of my last day of cutting as I’m paddling for my island camp, I see a lone dude walking nearby. He stops, crouches down, and placed an effigy, so that answered that question for me too. And immediately after placing it he turned around and ran through it, destroying it. Artists are their own worst critics I guess.
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after 3 days and 35 runs i think i’m done with noita and can officially declare that it sucks to play but the physics stuff is neat ig
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