I’d try cleaning the cartridge contacts with a Q-Tip and some contact cleaner, it might help.
3 Likes
that game sticks with you in the real way that a monastery fire probably would
6 Likes
Demo for Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse is up and, hmm. Hmm. Not sure about this one.
Gameplay is OK, I don’t mind the look of the game, but goddamn everyone talks so fucking much (and the writing is, hmm, not feeling it). And you’re bombarded with like, Objective: Search the Sewers and other stuff popping up on the screen.
It also doesn’t run great on Steam Deck…it does some real funky zooming in menus and stretching during cut scenes that is super distracting, and dips a lot.
I want to believe, but I dunno.
8 Likes
Pretty deep into Rogue Trader. Actually shocked how good this one is, how fun, and how much I like it. Lots of little optimizations that both fit diegetically but also solve fiddly crpg problems.
Each of its pieces is like 20% too long and the 40k setting is sort of fundamentally boring after a while even though they try to vary it up as much as they can (again damaged by the everything is 20% too long problem). But I’m having a blast. One of those games where I’m always thinking of the next time I’ll get to play it when I’m not playing it.
5 Likes
Hey, I actually finished a run Dice of Kalma. Not bad, for one of those types of games. No desire to play anymore though, it scratched the itch.
2 Likes
Ok, I think I’m at the big grind now. I made it to Cantlin, got a load of information, found Erdrick’s token and made the bridge. But I need to kill the axe knight and that jerk is brutal. I got the flame sword but I still would like to get the silver shield. Also I don’t actually know where Erdrick’s sword is, just the armor. I’m hoping the silver shield will be enough to push me over the edge, as I can kind of kill knights and demon knights ok, but it gets dangerous and I don’t want to go back to the castle to be safe about it every time. At least I have repel. I probably still should do it that way because it saves me more money, but whatever. It’s a long way to go, the most grinding specifically to grind I think I’m going to have to do. I’ll probably level up again before I get the shield too, so that should help. Wish I could manage to take out a metal slime. Tricky little guys.
10 Likes
Fired up Dynasty Warriors 3 Remastered on Switch 2. Playing with classic settings. Switch 2 has slowdown but I like it this way. Feels more authentic.
Playing on Easy and I’ve died a couple of times already. Old school Dynasty Warriors is not mindless! Enemy officers can do the same things you can, so when their health is low you gotta finish them before they super musou. I’ll switch to Normal after I clear a story or two. Start on Easy to gain some items and build up your bodyguards. This is the DW way.
9 Likes
Spent a few days this week on Sonic Mania playthroughs, Mania Mode and Encore Mode. Now I’m listening to the Beatles’ Rubber Soul Super Deluxe.
This weekend I’ll tell some kids to get off my lawn and then yell at a cloud.
10 Likes
Tales of Berseria
The final tale. CW: suicide, incest
So, we left off in a dungeon that climaxes with our characters learning a lot about the villain and their motives. To summarise, the pope, who is also our half-brother, lost his wife and unborn child into the same demon hole he threw our brother into later. His wife and child were then immediately reincarnated as members of the game’s fae race and became slaves for the church. Apparently to start resurrecting God, the sacrifice requires two pure souls, the unborn child being the first and Velvet’s brother Laphicet the second. Laphicet, it turns out, voluntarily opted for sacrifice due to his terminal illness but pope didn’t tell Velvet this. I don’t think this really makes us sympathetic to Pope, but it’s treated as a reveal to try and send Velvet over the edge and make her give into despair. But luckily our party support us, especially Laphicet 2 (our unborn nephew reincarnated who is now the subject of our surrogate brocon affection) who literally tells Velvet to ‘stop whining’ about how miserable her life is. This does the trick, and she concludes that love has been taken from her so vengeance will be her sole motive from now on. I think it kind of works as a twist on the usual trope of vengeful character learns vengeance is bad. Instead, they lean into it further regularly acknowledging how they are destroying others’ lives but that they don’t really care. Velvet also softens a bit from this point and her voice direction resembles that from the start of the game.
Anyway, we escape the trap the church set for us and fight our God brother (original Laphicet is now just God) and this kicks off the end game quests where we wrap up killing each party member’s corresponding church member who they all have past beef with. The church enacts their plan of taking free will from everyone across a wide portion of the planet. Not only that but criminals are forced to commit suicide. There’s no conflict and its utopian but obviously awful.
The party’s counterplan is to use the souls that Velvet has eaten to resurrect four gods at four locations, but for convenience (for both the player and the developer) they discover they can just do it at one place called a life pool. The 4 high-ranking church member’s souls are used to resurrect the 4 elementals which is established as a bad idea, and from this point onwards your character gains the reputation of the ‘Lord of calamity’ which becomes kind of accurate. It starts as church propaganda, but you do become worse than you were before but still not quite as bad as the church in the long term. We finally summon the 4 elementals which is akin to summoning meteor and throws the world into turmoil, but at least gives people back their free will. It also forces the pope and crew to retreat to a space castle, the final dungeon.
Just before all this we have a hot spring episode with Laphicet 2 because not every brocon note has been hit yet. They sort of finally establish a deep platonic camaraderie which has a mildly crush-y edge despite the fact they are related to each other in an even stranger way than originally set up. Part of me wonders if it echoes the rest of the game’s ‘human flaws’ theme, in that many of the characters trample over various taboos because of love or doing what they feel is right.
I haven’t really talked about how much the game is about sailing and ships. One of our party members is a pirate leader and you traverse the world on a maritime navigational map. You can also send out scout ships to get supplies, but these are essentially little gacha rolls that take 30 minutes of real time. It’s not much but I liked the flavour.
There are also quite a lot of moments of silence after major plot beats but also generally throughout where there is no music. It gives it a kind of empty-game-void feeling, alongside the extremely still graphics and animations, which I like about this era of 3D RPGs of a certain budget.
I played the side shit. There’s a lot of it and it’s mostly just optional bosses/character specific side quests. This includes a bizarre set of quests where you meet characters from Tales of Xillia which seems to just be pure fan service since they are from a completely separate dimension. Tales strikes me as a series that fans tolerate a lot because they’re so invested. I feel like the edginess is what drew me to Berseria and is carrying me through because so much of the rest of the systems and ideas are frequently a mess. Tales otherwise just feels like such a mid series from an outsider’s perspective, but it is apparently popular.
At a certain point I just say to myself ‘let’s wrap this up’ and we do the longest and most mazy dungeon in the game complete with warp points. We get to the top and it’s time to kill Pope and lilbro god. Throughout various phases we get more insight into our pope’s motives, and I think the idea is to try and make him seem justified in a similar way to how we (party) operate by flawed reasoning but feel motivated enough to justify the means with whatever the ends are. Pope is not really justified, and it is not some masterstroke of moral storytelling. The more interesting wrapup has to do with what do you do with Velvet. She has openly murdered many people for completely selfish reasons that happen to align with stopping a greater evil. Narratively a redemption is needed, some kind of cost that prevents her from just having a happy ending since that would be weird and the option that they take is worth discussing.
We kill the Pope by the way. With the pope gone, lilbrogod Laphicet is out of control, specifically very hungry for people and their malevolence. Since Velvet can also demonically eat people to gain their power, she creates a sort of euthanasia through mutual ouroboros. She eats her little brother god while getting him to latch on to her. They embrace in an endless feeding cycle which neutralises them both.
The four elemental gods who we freed (who have not spoken at all up until this point) stroll up and say the world will die without a brogod, who wants to be brogod? Laphicet 2 becomes brogod. He chooses to purge the world of demons and malevolence and becomes a big dragon that everyone prays to.
Roll credits on Velvet and her little brother, embraced. Nude. Twirling forever. Throughout the credits we see a sort of internal dream they have together where they both go on wholesome what-if adventures together. If it were more tasteful art, I could see the idea paying off better, I can imagine Amano having a stab at this for instance. Yet this sums up a lot of the game. Good ideas but very rarely good execution. Incest/underage tags abound and the ending is not without controversy online to this day but I guess they went for it at least. There must’ve been a cheerleader in the directorial team saying ‘we really have to commit to the brocon, we need this fetish realised’. Like I said earlier, it kind of fits with the game trying to take things in a darker more taboo direction of playing selfish bad guys who are denied what they want by the church. Not so much ‘surprise, you are the bad guy’ but more ‘what if everyone was pretty bad but still a person’. But the incest stuff is also a bit weird. It pays off emotionally in the sense that all Velvet wanted was a normal life, and was forced to be a mass-murdering demon, it just so happens she was a bit closer to her brother than normal.
Not recommendable but I liked it a lot. There is an extensive post-game I happily ignore.
12 Likes
I was lamenting folks not using video games to better their Japanese. I decided then that night I would finally play Kamaitachi no Yoru, now available in English. I was playing in the original Japanese. I could play Lighting Returns or Goemon with relatively little problem, but this normal game about murders I had to look up so many words.
As opposed to most video games, it was also apparent an actual writer was at the helm. It was truly wonderful to encounter sentences with actual artistry. The story as well, it sets you at ease of what kind of story it is then the jaws snap shut and you’re trapped in the story the author wanted to tell.
For a Super Famicom adventure game there are 42 endings you could see. This is very early on and there is no fast foward. I eventually checked a guide after 7 endings because I didn’t want to read the same book a 4th time. If I read the guide right after you see 21 endings, then the alternate story endings unlock. I did not have that patience.
If you want a dark murder mystery for Spook Season, and you want to read that story at least 5 times, Kamaitachi no Yoru is there for you.
I will say I played this game my favorite way to play detective story/games. I stopped playing and thought about it all day. That’s potentially hours of time you don’t think about the horrors of the world.
17 Likes
you are giving me doubts about ignoring all tales games (every other one ive tried is terminally boring)
6 Likes
I would still trust that instinct. I should say I’m leaving out a lot of more generic cruft that puts 10 hours between each of my plot summaries where they doss around. I think if someone was gonna try one of these, this is the most interesting one I’ve seen in terms of premise and payoff.
6 Likes
Gotem
Even if the fight was literally just attacking and healmore, I’m still pretty pleased with the experience. Had to do just a little more grinding at the end. I’m guessing if I got to level 20 my spells would work against the dragonlord but I wanted to see if I could beat it before then and I just made it.
16 Likes
Are you sure you made the right choice there at the end?
9 Likes
I’m not letting some dragon loser corrupt me into ruling the world. It’s rude, and this guy has already basically declared war on everyone. Probably some other descendant of Erdrick is going to have to come kick my ass then. Nah!
7 Likes
now you have to play the direct sequel, Dragon Quest Builders
18 Likes
The spooky month of ghouls and horrors is upon us. It is time to engage in the tradition of playing some variety of haunting game featuring spooky stuff like spiders or even a ghost.
16 Likes
Spooktober and Daggerfall City is HAUNTED
3 Likes
Got home from work yesterday and did the sort of thing I’m wrongfully accused of too often, and stayed up way too late playing, uh, God of War.
I think in the last uhhh six years or so I’ve kinda gone sour grapes on a lot of Playstation stuff. Can’t/won’t get one, still mad about Japan Studio, so I’m retroactively “maybe this shit was never good, hrmph.” Coming back to God of War…maybe there’s a little more nuance than that?
Not necessarily for the game, just my being weird. I stayed up too late and I’m probably too tired to be typing this…
Anyway! Kinda like with going back to Spider-Man Remastered a while back, there’s a bit of a dip between what wowed me back when and playing it now. Unlike Spider-Man Remastered, I’m having a great time playing this again, so that’s nice!
I think the big thing of (shocking spoilers for a game from eight years ago uh oh) Kratos kinda literally digging up his old weapons from the original games didn’t have me hootin’ and hollerin’ like it did the first go around because…I know now they suck to use. That axe is so good, going back to those sloppy flails just ain’t the same.
I might just keep trucking with it. That said, I don’t think I will immediately truck onto Ragnarok. I remember why I took a huge break from playing that thing before finishing it first go around - it’s a fucking slog.
I still think Playstation should make cool games like they used to, though…
7 Likes