The business minigame in Romancing SaGa 3 is some sort of nightmare ultracapitalist nonsense in which the goal is to buy every company in the world, I love it
It drowns you into way too much information but is actually pretty simple; you buy companies by « « « asking » » » your own companies for money. Money is counter intuitively not really a limited source, you can ask unlimited times, but if you do it too much your companies will leave you
Some of your own companies can form groups that can also be asked for money and will give way more money than each company would give individually. The goal is to get as many groups as possible by buying a bunch of small companies first. You can’t buy everything in the first city immediately, you have to visit other cities and buy their own companies before coming back
I never found the skills useful but they allow you to be some asshole who bribes everybody and spreads false rumors about the competition so they’re cool?
In addition to slowly making my way through Planescape: Torment, a game where you play as a guy who seemingly can’t be killed who is of questionable moral fiber, I am also slowly making my way through Wario Land 3, a game where you play as a guy who seemingly can’t be killed who is of questionable moral fiber. I guess I have a type.
Anyways I’m maybe midway through Wario Land 3 and it is more interesting than enjoyable? It is almost like a weird experiment as it basically takes some of the concepts we see in various metrovanias (gain an ability or trigger a world change that allows you to access places you previously could not) and applies them to linear platformer levels. You go through the first few levels in order (you can double back to one that is affected by the day/night cycle; other stages mostly are just dimmer) and then you trigger a change that allows you to take a different path in a given stage and hence get to a different treasure. Eventually you gain an ability that basically acts like a key to various locks, and this is pretty much the entire flow of the game.
The game straight up tells you when a new path opens up in a given level and you can generally go to a temple to have a voice from above let you know of any you may have missed, so it isn’t even like the game wants you to explore very much or confuse you in any way.
Also a large number of these paths end up blocked by giant blocks that tell you to go complete a mini-game first; that mini-game every time so far has been playing a hole of golf.
The level design isn’t great and Wario isn’t nearly as fun to control as Mario (he can gain different attributes by taking damage from different enemies, but this is more another lock and key than anything else) and it is hard for me to call it a success. It kinda feels like a prototype where they experimented with these concepts before applying them to a more fleshed out latter project, kinda like if someone tried to design a sonic stage by making you go through a specific route through it each time before laying them all out atop each other and giving the player free reign.
it feels like people who lived through Japan in the 80s are much more intuitively inclined to treat capitalism like divination and I appreciate them for that
the bosses and some specific encounters are fixed and unlike rs2 you don’t really have access to much in the way of overpowered stuff until way later
also unlike rs1/2 you can’t really miss anything by fighting too many normal encounters so fight stuff! it’s only if you’re sitting in a cave specifically grinding that enemies will outpace you if you’re not also finishing quests and getting better gear, this is probably the most intuitive game in the series in that sense
in other rs3 remaster news i found the new post-game superboss and got fuuuucked
Ah okay, that explains it. I haven’t been able to beat the Rats Mischeif, the Tournament, or what I assumed were the endings to some other storylines. Felt like I couldn’t actually finish anything, but I guess I’ll just get back to exploring.
I got a free month of EA Access so I’m playing Medal of Honor Airborne. The default control scheme is completely fucked up for the time (jump is on the Y button and you have to hold in the left thumbstick to move while aiming otherwise you just awkwardly lean and duck everywhere) and everything looks all fucked up and jagged and muddy all the time but parachuting in wherever you want is kind of cool. It’s a Very Normal World War 2 Game until Operation Market Garden, where it turns into a PS1 shooter. You watch a guy’s head get crushed by a Tiger tank and then the game devolves into you getting into rocket launcher duels with like a dozen Nazis that keep vanishing and popping in because the draw distance is so low but can still shoot you from further away than you can see them. The last level is a huge concrete tower full of anti-aircraft guns and guys in gas masks who hipfire MG42s that kill you instantly. It is completely nuts.
I beat the Untitled Goose Game (starring the untitled goose)
Untitled Goose Game knows what fun is and it feels like they just stopped developing it once fun was achieved.
Zero ludo / narrative dissonance. Completely consistent audio visual presentation.
High fun, low difficulty. Here and done in just enough time to be memorable.
Playing as Mikhail in Romancing SaGa 3 for the first time and his ruling game just plain doesn’t work, the numbers are all wrong! The general consensus on the internet is that it is « bad » but it is more « so rushed it’s practically impossible »
The team was in a rush to ship this game and they clearly didn’t pay attention to the minigame exclusive to one main character out of 8. The remaster could have changed it though!
You start with 900k gold that you can allocate to: social services / industry / military / diplomacy / R&D by spending from 50k to 800k at a time. If you don’t spend everything on industry over and over by only investing the smallest amount possible, you’re already fucked
You run out of money in less than one minute, and your only immediate recourse is raising taxes to get some more. But this makes people angrier and poorer, and has severe diminishing returns. You could spend money on social services to counter that but you’ll get less than what you lost from raising taxes… so it’s just a waste of money.
When you completely run out the only options left are getting more money from the main game:
There’s a slight chance after every battle that your people will be slightly happier / richer. Both the chance and the bonus are very small and will never matter
Any money over 10k gotten in the main game will go in your treasury. This is laughable, you’ll get like 50-100k gold max total in one entire playthrough
That’s it!
As far as I know the only way people managed to get anywhere in this is through exploits
In a way this is sort of a poetic opposite to Romancing SaGa 2: In RS2 you spend the kingdom’s fortune to finance your adventures and it’s cool, in RS3 you try to pay all of a kingdom’s expanses with the pittance you make adventuring and it’s a disaster
I finished The Outer Worlds (as much as one can finish something clearly meant for multiple playthroughs and paths)
…it just kinda grinds to a halt, doesn’t it
the endgame has the same issue Bioshock had a decade-plus prior where the designers went “well, it’s the end, I guess we have to have some kind of boss thing, huh” (I’m probably saying a lot about the rickety path I took right now, as I can clearly see the all the various flags where you would just happily waltz to the end and throw a switch) and the design of it is like an early boss from a proper action game (also again I accidentally made a gunlord)
I feel like at times that the wealth of non-combat solutions to issues is a response to combat not being especially good (to which I can imagine a number of people reading that and going “no shit genius”), but if that’s the case, why have so much put into it and so many systems connected to it?
ultimately it sounds like I should go buy Disco Elysium or something
After many hours I’ve finally gotten into legit trouble in Planescape: Torment. After hearing tales of Ravel for ages I finally found them, got into a very lengthy conversation that spilled into a battle that at least initially did not appear to be avoidable. I got full party wiped, used up all my spells as a mage, and hit for basically worthless amount of damage. Through a dozen or two deaths I finally managed to separate her from the enemies she spawned and engaged in a battle where we just stabbed each other slowly while I hammered away at all the healing stuff I was carrying and mostly not using up until this point.
The issue is that I think I can resurrect maybe a single teammate at this point. When a teammate dies they drop everything that they are wearing or carrying into a pile aside from certain key items. My character is basically maxed out in terms of what he is carrying. If I can raise up a teammate I can hopefully load them up with the equipment the 5 of them were wearing and a few important looking things, but if not then I either have to abandon all of their equipment or virtually every item held by the party. If this is the case I am straight up checking a walkthrough to see what is very important.
There is one back up plan though. I bought that modron toy that takes me to that weird dungeon world, and I believe I can rest there. If I can rest there I can game abilities to stock up on resurrections, but I both don’t know if I can access there from where I am at (the whole point is how hard it is to leave) and if jumping there and resting will lose all of the stuff I’d have to leave lying in the ground in the meanwhile. Hopefully it works as if not I may have very severely screwed up my quest.
