played/beat it for the first time last november. didn’t really like it tbh! the little 500 character blurb i wrote after beating it pls don’t yell at me for using the word gameplay:
a very cool and super stylish game but the gameplay doesn’t quite cut it. the art style is really cool and the game reminds me of devil may cry in its over-the-top action. however, the character movement feels clunky and you spend nearly the entire game hitting the square button multiple times a second. it made my thumb tired! the story is basically a short little anime (and it got turned into a series) so that was pretty neat. i can’t see myself ever coming back to play this again, though.
what did you think of it?
what you described in maj’eyal sounds as much like gungrave-the-roguelike as any game ever could. v clever comparison tbh!
I played through gungrave a few years ago and didn’t do super well, but I want to go back again because I’m pretty sure it’s a game built around replays.
The original Gungrave I admire mostly for its sleek look and visceral style. It’s not something that holds up to repeat plays.
Gungrave: Overdose is an entirely different beast.
The best way to describe what makes GG:OD so great is that it takes a then-still-kinda-novel “regenerating shield, non-regenerating health” mechanic into a game that doesn’t usually allow you to hide from enemies and which rewards the player for keeping uninterrupted shooting chains going. Your panic button in all this are special skills, which you’ll usually use for their shield regen factor while getting those last few chained hits before your character collapses under the hail of bullets.
The easiest I can explain Gungrave: Overdose is that it takes a shmup mentality to its action, where special skills are your super weapons/bombs, and getting your Halo shield regen going requires you to know how to avoid enemies’ shots rather than slinking off to some corner.
GG:OD didn’t get the respect it deserves because…well, because I seem to be the only fan of it and perhaps that means something, but it was also released as a budget title for 20 dollars new and the graphics are appropriately low-rent. I don’t believe there’s a series whose games on the same platform got worse, not better, in the sequel other than Overdose. The cel-shading is gone, and it’s bad. It’s real bad.
If I ever break down and buy a video game recording device, I’ll try to remember how to play OD at a high level and put a few videos of it up. I feel there’s an art to the game that no other game has really matched. (On the other hand, I also consider Jet Force Gemini to be a classic–perhaps I just enjoy third person shooters that concentrate more on mobility rather than aim?)
The Gungrave games are the last gasp of a style of game that was common in the 90s home console era: short, replayable games too long to actually make it in an Arcade, but still short enough to be finished in a single session to encourage mastery. That format kinda died out with the 360/PS3-era as the modern “AAA videogame” pushed 'em out (and as Japanese devs got priced out of the market).
I feel like I could use a curated list of games like this from the PS2 era. The only thing I can think of right now is Shinobi, and that’s actually a pretty long game. Recommendations?
It’s been a long time, so I can’t quite remember Gungrave’s length, but I assume the Mister Mosquito games are this length. The Simple Series games probably fit in. I think the Devil May Cry games could fit into this category? If so, Chaos Legion would too. Way of the Samurai, maybe?
I feel like this could warrant a KOP thread of its own.
Panzer Dragoon series really fits the bill. They’re basically descendants of Space Harrier, so not terribly surprising to retain some of the arcade sensibility but they’re a bit longer (maybe a couple hours for 1&2, to… 4 or so for Orta?). Crimson Dragon on Xbox one is slightly too long for me to be comfortable saying it’s a one-sitting game at ~6 hours, but it’s brief enough to retain that feel. FWIW, a huge part of the reason I find Panzer Dragoon Saga so good is its comparatively short length (12-16 hours) compared to other RPGs.
Vanquish maybe. Again maybe a little bit too long at 6 or 7 hours, but Sega (well, Platinum) doing it again here. For that matter, the Bayonetta games almost get there with relatively short length and a really strong feeling of wanting to play again and get better at the game (the prominent scoring really helps this).
Neo Contra and Shattered Soldier? Practically the length of a long arcade game though, a couple hours (though the person writing this thinks Metal Slug 3 is TOO long, with that monster last stage).
Not that they’re exactly “master this complex and deep gameplay”, but I get the same feeling with a lot of Koei’s musou/Warriors games. Pick a character, play through a full story path in a couple hours. More a feeling of scratching a particular button-mashy itch in the classic “belt scroller” fashion and feeling satisfied that you’re done when you put the game down.
Can you sell me on the appeal of Panzer Dragoon (or for that matter, Space Harrier?)
They’re very boring games from what I played, too reliant on memorization, and too effortless if you have memorized the sequence of actions you have to take. It’s not like they’re very reflex intensive, just knowledge of level flow intensive. The frustrations I have with them reflect the frustrations I have with so many modern FPS designs, where I don’t feel like they require any skill from me, just patience with a generally dull experience.
@yarusenai report in on how Sky Odyssey does or does not fit into this category.
I kind of want to say Dragon Quarter fits into this. I want to, but even being the short jrpg it is, and despite how much it encourages restarting, it’s a stretch. Katamari Damacy is probably a bit too long. It would fit into a GCCX episode, though, and that’s a good criteria to go on, at least length-wise. God Hand is probably too long as well, but it encourages mastery for sure.
The original Dragon Warrior (or at least the remakes) is a one-sitting game, but there’s no interesting in improving at it beyond speedrunning. Then again, a lot of older console games are this way, so I’m not sure it counts. Though I do feel like Shiren the Wanderer fits in here in some way.
Was going to say the Star Fox and Sin & Punishment series(es?), but those are arcade games made for console.
(i wish there was a salute emoji. oh well. o7)
sky odyssey is a perfect candidate. it can be cleared in a couple of hours, and the final level is a two-parter, the first part of which can be one of three different stages depending on which order you cleared a set of earlier missions in. there are also a handful of airplanes to try, all of which really do handle differently.
the catch is that, as @meauxdal found out, the game can be pretty tough and one tiny miscalculation will crash your plane and fail the mission. i think that clearing it in one sitting might be something you have to work up to.
with that in mind, i’m curious about one aspect of the criteria: are these supposed to be games where you can just knock them out in one sitting with “mastery” consisting of clearing it faster or at harder difficulties, or are they supposed to be games that you gotta work with and learn and after enough practice you can finally beat it in one sitting? because like @Tulpa said, silent bomber is a pretty short game but i was stuck on that final boss for long enough that i had to put the game down and come back the next day and give it a couple more tries.
er not that i’m reading “in one sitting” literally but i think there are two ways of looking at this thing and i wanna make sure i’m barking up the right tree. like, are we looking for games like gungrave (plowed through it in one sitting without any real trouble, but it encourages replays with difficulty levels and rankings) or games like metal slug 2 (which is a short game, obviously, but i still have not beaten it).
also nominating ace combat – i’ve only beaten 1 and 2, but both of their campaigns were pretty short and their rankings/secret missions/branching mission paths encourage multiple playthroughs.
