i don’t really remember much about it tbh
i remember the funeral scene unfortunately lol
conversely, i will not play Blue Dragon again
WHAT YOU DONT WANT TO MASH THE BUTTON CONSTANTLY TO PICK UP PENNIES AND POTIONS IN EVERY CORNER OF EVERY MAP aaarrrgh i want to like that game but it digs into the one compulsion i have as a jrpg-poisoned person and then rewards me juuuust enough to keep doing it ITS SO MEAN
3 Likes
i really liked it when it came out, but i also barely remember it, and have since read things about it that i know i couldn’t tolerate in 2020 and so i want it to remain as a pleasant and vague memory
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i thought lost odyssey kinda stank honestly but the asian version came in a gorgeous box
playing through the critically acclaimed, beautiful looking remake of everybody’s favorite classic rpg: Sega Ages Phantasy Star
The new Ages mode, combined with the auto-map, turns what I assume would have been a slow-paced, grindy game into something fairly breezy. The fact that the game doesn’t railroad you down the critical path makes this a rather chill thing to just explore and let the saturated colors and bubbly FM sounds soak in. (It’s basically the kind of game I need right now.)
I’ve always known about the random bakery three floors deep in that one dungeon, but what I didn’t know is that you need the shortcake that guy sells in order to talk to the governor on an entirely different planet.
Game has a nice sense of humor, and the translation seems fairly solid for 1988.
You can just talk your way out of some fights (and not just the ones you might expect at first). Makes me feel guilty when I murder them sometimes.
There were some progression-related things at the beginning that made me scratch my head and look at a guide, but somehow I was able to figure out by myself the moon logic of pouring a vial of near-universal solvent onto a pile of scrap metal in order to create a functioning robot co-pilot for the spaceship that you commissioned from a mad (?) scientist who went into hiding (who is not to be confused with Dr. Mad (a completely unrelated character)).
You can buy your kitty thick fur. 10/10
16 Likes
it’s entirely possible i’ve been mislead wrt whether lost odyssey is good or bad but idk the opening hour was good enough i wanna play more once xenia no longer stutters in cutscenes lol
but now i’m playing fft, faxanadu, and a bunch of other random nes and famicom games
that you get a trophy if you pick up eeeeeevvvvverrrryyyyyything is a horror.
the battle system is pretty slow and uninvolved. right around when I quit I found some minigame that turned out to just be some more random battles I could play for rewards.
1 Like
i have an extremely, extremely low tolerance for writing like this, which might partially explain my initial aversion to lost odyssey (and nier for that matter)
i know it’s bad practice to judge so early on, but yeesh
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oof
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Oh, Phantasy Star is so good. And I like how the absurd layer of helper stuff they’ve added on the Switch release (from what I’ve seen, not owning a Switch myself) seems to kinda recreate enough of the original context and headspace to allow a person to enjoy it as originally intended. Because it’s not 1987 anymore, and the assumptions that worked then don’t necessarily work now.
The fact that the changes are basically superficial and to do with interface and offloading confusing management of details that it was expected the player would just know to keep track of in their head or on paper—I think it should help to emphasize just how forward-thinking the game was with a lot of the things it was doing. Like, it clears the clutter of “what the fuck am I even doing,” to allow the design to breathe. This came out the same week as Final Fantasy! And look how it tells a story, by comparison.
7 Likes
i played some fft with the felix patch. extremely good game at which i am extremely bad. blame yourself or god 
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Been playing OpenRCT2 with a friend. Today, we played Haunted Harbor from the Corkscrew Follies pack. You start with this:
Even though the scenario deliberately provides you with super cheap land prices to expand, for funsies, we decided to complete the scenario without buying any land whatsoever. As a result, we ended up with this madness:
And with the support beams hidden:
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flashbacks to 2001 listening to Fenix TX and playing RC2.
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I loved .hack when i was a teen lol. From what i remember of that 1st ps2 series, it’s a handful of neat ideas and moments between lots of repetitive random dungeoning. Definitely not 4 games worth of content. The simulation of having Internet Friends to go MMO with is pretty cute. I don’t think i’d ever replay them but i ought to check out a let’s play sometime and refresh myself on the cool parts
The //SIGN anime is kind of a similar deal (boring with best bits) but i remember sorta liking what a conversational slow burn it was. And the soundtrack rips
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my friend made //SIGN sound really fucking good and trans but idk, .hack fans may be a perfidious lot who just really want someone to talk to about it in 2020. I’m gonna watch some of it later today.
I like that you frequently have to log out to read the forums for story stuff and tips or go back to the OS to read emails. The combat and dungeons are abysmal in a early PS2 jrpg way but um, I guess I’m still here for the story. or at the very least, for all this early 2000s MMO/internet stuff
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I’ve been enjoying Operencia: The Stolen Sun. It’s an Unreal Engine first-person dungeon crawler with grid-based movement and turn-based battles.
The environments are very pretty, fully-realized 3D spaces (as opposed to the more repetitive and abstracted dungeons of games like Etrian Odyssey).
The story is based on Hungarian folklore and feels like an ominous fairy tale. The voice acting is uneven, but the dialogue and party banter is somewhere between amusing, charming, and cringey.
Enemy groups don’t seem to respawn, so every battle feels a little momentous if not difficult. Regular battles often have unique dialogue.
Last night I unlocked the ability to search for buried treasure. Whenever I find some, a (poorly-worded) tooltip pops up that says “Alas! Treasure.” I like this sentiment.
3 Likes
Been playing through Quake, it’s interesting!! I think the inevitable comparisons to DOOM would do it a disservice - it feels much more high risk and high speed than DOOM does on the first playthrough. What I’m saying is that both are quick games, but DOOM encourages a certain thoughtfulness and caution the first time through, but the only way to engage with Quake monsters is through speed and effectiveness. Plus the levels are, so far, much less labyrinthine, so it again encourages that kind of “blast through at max speed” play style.
It’s fascinating! I just finished the first episode and am on to the second.
The soundtrack rules.
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Actually the soundtrack is a really interesting comparison to DOOM as well. It’s much more ambient-death-noises than DOOM could possibly be, so in a way you’d think it would encourage that slow style of play versus DOOM’s more “Metallica played by a computer” approach. But instead, to me it instills a sense of dread that makes me want to just Get Out Of This Dang Place.
Until @slime started playing Hall and Oates in the stream, of course
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completed grim fandango and interested to see that ralph carney of tin huey is listed as playing trumpet, trombone etc on the soundtrack. this completely irrelevant trivia will only be of interest if you too have a weird fascination with 70s cleveland art rock.
I enjoyed the rest of the game as well. I played it once years ago and was thrown off each time by how much of the gameplay is just trying to get around these very goofy mechanical obstacles - that considering how atmospheric and character-driven it seems like it’ll be you’re pretty much thrown into solving puzzles with balloon animals right away, with other characters mostly acting as passive set dressing. It took me a while to get on the wavelength but I think it helped once I figured out the game was pretty earnest about using these things to illustrate minor details about the world, that it was as interested in the demon animals and such as in the characters, and then applying that mindset to the rest of the game. There were still some pretty dreadful puzzles and one I only solved in the end by looking up a solution and finding the thing that had meant to happen was glitched out. I still don’t know what kind of nigh-erotic fixation videogame developers have with the idea of driving a forklift.
Also interested in how many of the themes were kind of handled with a light touch, either deliberately or accidentally. The cutscenes imply Manny to be a kind of monster of ambition, and it feels like a lot of the segments are kind of playing off that (being groomed for a manager position on the island, eventually returning to your old office, the general running conflict between the worldliness of all these gangster types and the unworldliness of their setting). But because it’s an adventure game you’re still spending a lot of time just kind of aimlessly roaming around, navigating through magical associative thought as much as instrumental reasoning. I think I actually liked the thematic stuff more for being a slightly out-of-focus background murmur rather than something more prominent.
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