the new yokai stuff seems somewhere in-between “the game’s encounters were vaguely redesigned around these new mechanics” and “these mechanics seem somewhat undercooked”
having new moves: more moves and being able to have a loadout or switch at shrines is good!
the burst counter: okay, what if we put in a parry that’s absurdly powerful, except it’s only usable against certain attacks yokai use that have HUGE AUDIO AND VISUAL TELEGRAPHS but sometimes they don’t work because the timing and results are inconsistent
landing counters feels good because your stomping attacks that would chunk you for 33-80% health into the ground and deleting a large portion of the yokai’s ki bar, but at the same time, with the same timing on certain attacks, I would either get a counter, a regular block (bad because it drains your ki and leaves you open), a perfect block or the buffs from the counter but it wouldn’t counter the attack (???)
and whose idea was it to have the audio telegraph for a grapple attack and the audio indication that you gained a section of anima meter be similar
also it has snake ladies with big-ass titties, comically so
I have been on a pilgrimage to the Reliquary of Saturn.
The first game I indulged in was Sega Rally Championship. I love how these cars feel! It feels like a graceful midpoint between Outrun and Outrun 2. There’s a painterly quality to the tracks; tire marks resembling brush-strokes, the decals of the cars being reduced to blocky detail. It’s kind of beautiful! Hearing “Fiiiiiiiiiiinish” makes every race have the perfect ending.
Today, I spent an hour or so with Burning Rangers. I’ve always heard about what a mess it was but I wish someone had told me that the mess is in service of something so endearing. I find myself loving it in spite of the terrible draw distance, constant clipping, slowdown, and other technical flaws. It is a Fabergé egg held together with duct tape, the decades-old first car my brother owned whose passenger window couldn’t roll up.
On a mechanical level, movement actually manages to feel fluid despite the limitations. Rolling, gliding, and diving underwater have a joyful flair and I find myself imagining what could have been if the technology had allowed for more open environments.
The absolute peak of my experience was going through the second stage. You are responding to a fire that has broken out at an aquarium amusement park/aquatic research center. There is a dolphin that needs your help. You help it and it helps you. You ride off together in the end. I can’t not love this game.
That’s something I forgot to mention! The music in the game is great! There are all these incidental tracks that pop up after certain events. Aside from the bombastic hits, I dig these mellow tunes:
I just started playing Labyrinth of the Witch on my phone last night. So far the game looks to be a competent Mystery Dungeon clone, and it has very nice music. It’s free to play, and I might spend $6 Canadian to disable ads, but I won’t pay to unlock characters, cosmetic items, exp boosts, etc.
I rarely play games on my phone, but I’ve wanted something like this for a long time. That’s not to say there aren’t other mobile games like it, but this is the first I’ve found that really scratches my Mystery Dungeon itch.
This one isn’t too different from what I remember of Dark Moon, just improved all around. The environment and boss design is better. You’re still solving non-puzzles and tossing every drawer and cabinet, but it’s quicker and more engaging as a team.
I’m playing as Gooigi. He’s better than Luigi in virtually every way except only Luigi can give Toad a high five.
I’ve been plugging away at Planescape: Torment and my big fear coming in was the combat as I basically had no concept of it.
I still have no concept of it but it keeps happening and even if I die I generally kill someone beforehand, and since I’m immortal I just run back to where I last was and resume hacking away mindlessly.
Except recently there was a room with three ghouls who killed me quick but there was something in there that I felt like I had to interact with, so I ran in repeatedly until I got some critical strikes in to kill one of them, then repeated until I got another one, then it only took a couple tries to take out the last one.
People say this but I think this involves running constantly and knowing which people to not even start talking to. I get jumped by random people in the streets regularly and recently went through a catacomb full of dozens of enemies.
the thing with P:T’s combat is that all your allies can pretty much auto battle so you’re (almost) the only one who needs to worry about spellcasting, which if you use the function keys keeps the whole thing close to playable, and the thing about P:T’s early game is that it’s a sea of brown and pretty much defies any attempt to approach it as a conventionally paced CRPG until the second act. the NPCs and areas that will actually advance the plot for you are not at all signposted and the writing is very D&Dish by modern standards even for how good it is, so if you want to meet it on its own terms you really have to approach it like an older adventure game at the start.
until fairly recently it was unmatched in a number of respects and now I think there are loads of overall better CRPGs but it is definitely worth it, just take it slow and don’t expect to make much progress at first. If you really need to get on your feet, you can look up how to get a third party member and how to class change to mage (which you want in this game, no question) pretty much right away. I would strongly advise against looking up any more than that though, you should get to know that big first area and talk to people as much as you can. One particularly ridiculous fetch quest should not be skipped.
my brain kept hearing the word legion amd connecting it back to chaos legion which is i guess somehow not far from the truth because all of the team worked at the same era of capcom
So I finished the main chunk of MGS Peace Walker, though I still have the last extra bits that set some things up for Ground Zeroes. Plot is a lot of ridiculousness that’s probably no different from the rest of MG ridiculousness really but I find myself not really caring much but the ending does a good job of putting Big Boss in the right headspace that leads him down the path of OG Metal Gear and MG2.
Otherwise best plot element is clearly the KGB agent whose cover is a professor, because he’s seen through immediately at the start because Big Boss is a pro who has been at this game for a while and also probably because it’s 1974 and the dude has a cybernetic hand that is also bright red and has CCCP stamped on the back of his wrist. I wonder if that was his idea or his superiors were just fucking with him.
The game being mission/stage based does mean a lot of the story junk doesn’t feel like it’s interrupting you so much though and also cuts down on annoying backtracking that has often been an issue in the series, but QTE events in them are a pain. I appreciate that all your bosses are just tank/chopper fights or the various AI weapons, a nice change of pace from yet another gang of weirdo super soldiers, though the some of the AI weapons kind of grate on me simply because they apparently decided to throw the idea of semi rational tech progress out the window.
I feel MGS3 had a reasonable amount of super science going on relative to a world that we knew at the time to have had bipedal nuke bots with laser beams by 1995, and while the Pupa is just a knockoff Shagohod and the Cocoon basically a land battleship somebody dreamed up before WW2, the Chrysalis is straight up futuristic looking thing with little UFO drones that make the ones from MGS2 look like garbage and Peace Walker itself is this 500 ton behemoth that runs and jumps around like it weighs almost nothing and doesn’t come of less advanced then anything we’ve seen to that point 20+ years down the timeline, even if it does have silly (in a good way) drill missiles.
Well I got stuck on what was like the only boss battle in The Outer Worlds and instead of gitting gud I just uninstalled the game and watched the ending on YouTube.
Overall pretty decent I guess, hardly essential. Did genuinely delight me often via the party members who I think sort of steal the show. Some other good surprises and events that do not proceed as expected.
So I guess, sure, if you skipped Fallout 4 and 76 like I did you could probably dip your toes into this spiritual successor and have a good time.
Sidekick tiers
Best: Parvati and SAM
Fine: Ellie, Nyoka, Max
Felix
It’s funny because the absence of super soldiers is one of the things that turned me off, although after the Beast Unit perhaps the concept was retired (or sensibly even?).
