i want a place to talk about these games both individually and as a whole body of work, especially because fromsoft has always been exceptionally resourceful and cohesive in iterating on a relatively small but diverse set of “seed concepts” over long periods of time. it was strange that relatively few people mentioned echo night when talking about déraciné, for instance.
anyway, yesterday i watched a longplay of murakumo, the first fromsoft xbox title and from my secondhand impression kind of a prototype for the extreme speed aerial mech nightmare perfected in god’s most perfect videogame, armored core for answer. “GameSpot’s Giancarlo Varanini described it as ‘one of the worst games to come out for the Xbox this year.’” sounds good to me!
are evergrace 1 and 2 any good? (besides the soundtracks, which are obviously canon as fuck)
also ccing @meauxdal on this thread, resident world champion king’s field and shadow tower speedrunner
i did in fact play the adventures of cookie & cream on a date with my now-husband because he loves it and it STRESSED ME THE FUCK OUT i respect it though
Evergrace’s misguided action mechanics would be tolerable if it didn’t go so heavy on grinding, but as it stands it’s way too slow for the odd tone.
I played through Metal Wolf Chaos last week and it carries the lunatic Capcom PS2 vibe well. I’m always ready to watch that Japanese cultural tendency towards sloganeering applied to some circus vision of America, down to cutesy mission titles announced by a drumroll and the main character’s personal motto, a robust “Because I’m The PRESIDENT OF THESE GREAT UNITED STATES OF AMERICA”
there’s more than a small amount of Iraq War anger in the game, but I prefer the bitter cynical cool of Armored Core 5’s Blackwater companies.
The villain kept poking my brain with a forgotten resemblance until I finally put it together:
I wouldn’t be surprised, it looked a little bare but was presentable enough. It has the good sense to be done in about 6 hours, just perfect for this disposable satire
yeah i was talking with a friend recently about how we love the political weight of the (extremely minimal but very precise) writing in ACFA so much more than the sort of meminess that attracted devolver to do their cringey MAGA-inspired reissue campaign for metal wolf chaos. ACFA is like “you are an indentured mercenary for corporations that exist to profit from an earth already destroyed by the kind of work you currently do, even operating your mech in the first place does incalculable ecological damage, no matter which ‘side’ you pick you follow orders that result in the deaths of millions of people, it is impossible for you to be a hero, you are an innate force of evil, you fuck”
It’s very good, although I prefer the directly ironic approach of 5. Instead of 4’s abstracted, nameless, eternal despair, it’s ultra-realistically-textured, sourced from modern-day war, amping it up to be cooler, more explosive, more depersonalized and mechanics-fetishizing, but never not obvious in the utter wrongness. The risk is that it’s too similar to a decade of post-Call of Duty 4-shooters, but it’s so sure of where it’s going, and so removed from the American perspective that it still has the distance for affecting criticism.
Ironically I feel the opposite about Souls games; I much prefer the abstracted Nameless Ones of Demon’s than the parade of named gods of the homebrew campaign of Dark Souls.
Look at how they present this world, it’s so focused on how the intricate gearing on these machines work that the massive destruction they’re inflicting is backgrounded, and conspicuously so.
i need to actually play 5 myself, but my initial qualms from watching parts of it were that it looked more in line with earlier armored core titles in that it’s fairly slow and ground-based, while for answer in particular feels like a game for newtypes, lightning-fast, slippery, strafing-based, aggressive aerial movement, which works so well with what the game does tonally and narratively. i should approach 5 on its own terms, though, and i will probably end up liking it if i do. on the other hand, i prefer demon’s souls as a game, but dark souls’ specificity lends more concrete weight to what is (to my mind) a world-narrative about the transition from feudalism to capitalism in medieval europe.
Evergrace was one of the key inspirations for my final project at uni. It has the most stunning oranges and its pace is perfect. It has conch shell huts and the ocean is a sick lurid green like a 2014 altgame. All the monsters are like slightly too large mosquitos and stuff. It is definitely not good and when you’re wading through boring dungeons it sucks but it is well worth it imo. Soak in it baby.
