Terraria is a game I put quite a lot of hours to back when I was a teenager. It's a game that's been around for forever, and has at least once been claimed by its developers to be at an end state and won't see anymore updates, but it seems a new huge content patch is always on the horizon whether the game is in "active development" or not, and it's changed a LOT since I last played it XD. I played it a bunch over the course of a few days with my significant other, and we got to the end credits (which I was quite surprised to see, honestly) after about 21 or so hours of play together.
Terraria doesn't really have a story. It got a lot of comparisons to Minecraft back when it came out over a decade ago, and not totally unreasonably so. It's a game about spawning in a world of wilderness whose primary component is made up of blocks you can manipulate to build new structures. There are NPCs to find and interact with, and they have a cute sense of humor, but it really isn't the main reason you're here, and virtually all of their dialogue is very easily ignored if you wanted to. Though there are named enemies and themes among them and such, there isn't really anything that could be called a narrative, but that's just fine. The primary thing that sets Terraria apart from Minecraft isn't just that the former is 2D while the latter is 3D, but Terraria also has a design centered much more around loot and combat rather than building pretty structures. Most of the gameplay loop of Terraria revolves around exploring to get materials (usually mining, but sometimes dungeon delving) to then gear up and/or find the materials necessary to fight the next boss in the game's progression. These bosses generally have some key material they drop or change the world in some way upon their death that will allow you to embark upon the next tier of gear hunting and dungeon delving to fight the NEXT boss, and so on and so forth. The game takes place on a 2D plane, and you have all sorts of weapons you can fight them with. You can tech towards a melee (either swinging or stabbing or even yo-yos or maces if you want to) or ranged (whether it be bows or guns) character, or you can go for magic (and there are oodles of spells to find). Since I had last stopped playing, they've even put in items and sets around summoning familiars to fight for you as well, which is a playstyle I had a lot of fun using as a supplementary part of my other builds. Though it is only 2D, you get more and more ability to gain more mobility and terrain manipulation as you go through the game. At first you're either just fighting the bosses on their own terms or buildling little arenas of floating platforms to better fight them in, but eventually you can get wings to fly, pegasus boots, anti-gravity potions, and much much more, and that's not counting the bosses that have special arenas you need to fight them in on their own terms. The game can be pretty damn difficult, but the bosses are really tightly designed and you need a lot of strategy to take them down alone. Honestly, my main complaint with the game (aside from that some difficulty spikes are a bit too steep) is that it's mostly designed around a single-player experience in most respects, as just having one other person between the two of us made many bosses MUCH easier as they had to split their attention between two targets instead of one. The presentation of Terraria is quite simple in most respects, but it's also very charming. You can build pretty buildings full of furniture if you want (and you'll have to at least build simple houses for all the NPC merchants you'll want in your town), and you can also not just wear cool armor, but even dress yourself up in all sorts of silly vanity costumes if you like (ranging from a simple wizard costume to a downright copyright infringing Toad from Super Mario costume you can find XD). The music is often quite understated, but it does its job well, especially for the boss fights. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Terraria hasn't stuck around for only a decade on pure luck alone. It's a really solidly designed game with a very satisfying gameplay loop that's tons of fun whether you're alone or with friends. It's a very easy pick-up to recommend if you're looking for a fun time on either a PC or a console, and it's very likely that even the current version I've played won't be the actually full experience if I revisit it again in another few years x3
0 Comments
Mon Amor is the most recent game released by Onion Games (the folks who made Dandy Dungeon), and it went on HUGE discount very shortly after release (down from like $10 to around $3), so I figured why not pick it up. Even if I don't enjoy playing them as much as I did Dandy Dungeon, the sheer power of the aesthetics alone generally justify an Onion Games purchase on sale for me. It took me around 3 hours to complete all of the game's content in the English version.
Mon Amor has very little text outside of its menus, and it's story is pretty light as well. A guy is getting married, but just as he's saying "I do", his bride to be as well as all the guests get spirited away by three witches. He then sets off to rescue all of the beautiful lady guests as well as his lady love so they can actually get married. In between game overs (as this game is designed around having many runs), you get more vignettes of him running into small buildings/vehicles/whathaveyou and getting swarmed by all the ladies (before shouting "Mon Amor!") with his lady love sometimes being shown his actions by the witches who kidnapped her. There seems to be a tilt towards the surreal in its presentation and a general theme of the protagonist of a game not being such a good guy just because he's the protagonist, but it's a very light theme and ultimately not all that important. Though on one final note, I did enjoy how this game has (intentionally or not) a very pro-self-description view on gender. Even girls you save who have conventionally masculine characteristics (such as facial hair) are still called "girls" in the points wrap-up screen, which I thought was neat (though upon reflection could be another element pointing towards how the protagonist just views everyone he saves as identical, no matter who they are on the inside). The more important thing to Mon Amor is the gameplay, as it's *much* more of a "phone game" than Dandy Dungeon was in terms of the depth of its content. I had first heard Mon Amor described to me as a "Flappy Bird Clone", and that's really not too far from the truth. The little man flies from left to right, trying to rescue the girl on the right side of the screen, and you hold A to make him rise and let go of A to make him fall. If you take a hit from the walls, you die unless you have a girl in tow, in which case she'll drop off and you'll need to play the stage again to rescue her. The only way to see the credits is to properly rescue every girl, which means ferrying her from the stage you rescued her in all the way to the next factor of 10 stage in the line, and especially in the last 10 stages this can be pretty damn tough. Thankfully, you can pick a stage to start from on the main menu (even if you failed to save that girl, you can still start right from there, which is a very nice feature). What sets this apart from normal Flappy Bird is that instead of dodging through gaps of oncoming pipes or whatever, you're effectively going across the same screen every time, but every time you complete a stage little buildings and blocks rise more and more from the top and bottom of the screen, and touching them means death. Your means of combating these encroaching walls are gotten by saving the girls, as once you save them, a burst of hearts spring forth in the direction you saved them from, and as hearts accumulate on screen, they collect into bigger hearts. Touching these big hearts (or the fruit which are also spawned by the stages or the girls) pushes back the walls, and bigger hearts also give bigger point totals, so there's a fair amount of skill involved in collecting the girl from the right location to try and get hearts in the right place so you can push those walls back. There are also boss stages (ones with actual non-wall obstacles) every 9th stage, and each of the five worlds takes from a respective pool of six possible stages for this one. This is a bit of a bugger, as trying to get a girl you haven't rescued yet from one of these stage-9 random stages can be a real pain if the RNG gods decide to show you spite. It's ultimately pretty light on the bones as far as content goes, but if you like a score attack game, this is a pretty darn solidly put together experience. The presentation, as assumed, absolutely does not disappoint. The graphics are simple, but very charmingly presented 2D sprites, and the colors and stage effects are really eclectic and eccentric too, particularly in the boss stages. There aren't a ton of songs in the game, and in fact the same short song plays in just about every stage, but it's a good track, and it not only grows more and more layers depending on which world you're in, but the boss stages also get their own unique versions of it. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. The hesitation on this recommendation doesn't really come from the quality of the game so much as from it's price tag. While Mon Amor is a really solid product for what it is, I think most Switch owners are gonna have a tough time paying $10 for what's here given just how light the content is. This is a game that's probably much more enjoyable to play on a phone, given the gameplay style, and only the most dedicated of score attack fans are going to get $10 out of this game, particularly on a console. Dandy Dungeon is a mobile game released a few years later on Switch, and it's made by Onion Games, the fine folks who hold a lot of the most important alums from Love De Lic (who made games like moon RPG). Now, these are *technically* one game and then the massive free expansion billed as an in-game sequel. However, not only because we so often count here both originals and expansions/DLCs as separate entries on our beaten lists, but also because the expansion here is both SO massive and also has a lot of important differences compared to the original, I felt it was right to review them simultaneously but also differentiate between them. It took me some 15~20 hours to beat the original Dandy Dungeon in English, and another 25~30 hours to finish the sequel and the rest of the side content (most of it anyhow).
Dandy Dungeon is, as the title explains out, the story of Yamada, who is a hopelessly single and incredibly quirky games programmer in his mid-30's. He lives alone and slaves away for Empire Games every day at work, but he has dreams of making his own game. One day, the day the game you're playing starts, he beings designing his OWN game, the game within the game that you yourself will begin playing. However, he starts skipping work to do this, and he summarily gets fired as the chairman of the company comes down to berate him and beat him up. This all coincides with the arrival of Maria-chan in the adjacent apartment to Yamada, a beautiful girl who loves blue skies, the ocean, and eating sweet potatoes in autumn. Yamada tries to use his game to win Maria-chan's heart and save her as the princess in each of the dungeons in it, but Empire Games break into his house (he should really buy a lock for his door) and reprogram it to lock his source code and foul it up with their own machinations. It's up to Yamada (and by extension you) to beat his game within the game and win Maria-chan's heart! Now all of that is kind of a lot, and it is on purpose. Like most of Onion Games's games, their works don't have nearly as much to say as something from their past like moon RPG, but they still have something to say nonetheless. Dandy Dungeon is a delightful pastiche of video games as well as of the people who make and play them. It continuously blurs the wall between the reality of Yamada's game-within-a-game and the world he actually lives in, and the dialogue writing is genuinely really funny. I was worried I'd fill up my Switch with all of the dialogue screenshots I was taking it was making me cackle so hard XD. Dandy Dungeon's main story is localized impeccably, and is a fantastic example of how to do localization incredibly right. Dandy Dungeon 2 takes place immediately after the first game, once you've beaten Empire Games, rescued Maria-chan, and gotten her hand in marriage, she's whisked away (in a very obvious parody of the original Ghosts'n'Goblins intro) by a new foreign games company: Dark Solid. Yamada's friends(?) from his Empire Games days come to his aid to stop this new threat to Maria-chan and Japan itself, as Yamada must scour Tokyo's Yamanote Train Line to beat up the weirdos who have inhabited each station. The sequel and other expansion content change things up in a few new ways. The goal is very much still to rescue Maria-chan, most certainly, but the messaging has gone from "pastiche" to "being the Ur Mobile Game", from having an in-game microtransaction store (which in the mobile version actually IS a microtransaction store, but here uses in-game currency) called mamazon.mom to goading you for how the game never has to end if you never rescue Maria-chan. Though it sadly dips its toes much more thoroughly into the weeds of casual racism and transphobia/homophobia than the original game (which never even touches it, really), the good, funny quality of the writing stays present. The other sad thing here is that the localization is notably *far* less polished, at times feeling more like a rough draft than a finished product. It for the most part is fine, and it's just far worse-looking in comparison to how good the original game's localization is, but it also impacts your ability to understand the game's instructions at points that actually make it kinda impossible to proceed without doing random trial and error (but I'll get into those specifics later). The sequel's story is a fine and fitting addition to the first game, but it's lower quality, particularly in the translation department, can't really be ignored. Now, you're probably asking: What the heck is the game-within-a-game that we're Yamada-ing through these two games, anyhow? That's a great question! What Dandy Dungeon is is a rogue-lite played one floor at a time. Dandy Dungeon is a game composed of dozens of dungeons composed of (usually) a few floors each, and your goal is to get from the start to the end of each floor by drawing one continuous line over each and every tile in it. Yamada will then follow this line unchangingly, fighting whatever enemies he comes across as well as picking up treasure. You can equip a helmet, armor, a shield, and a weapon (all of which are upgradeable) before you go in (and these can give special passive bonuses). You also can take along five items which can be activated once their cooldowns wear off (and items can only be used so many times before they break, and the cooldown lengthens with every use until breaking). It's probably not hard to tell from the description that this was originally a mobile game, but it's a damn good and addicting one. Navigating around the walls, monsters, and traps in each dungeon has a really fun puzzle-solving dopamine hit to it, and it scratched a very familiar itch to something like how Paper Mario: Origami King's puzzle-based combat did for me. The strategy of how to tackle each stage, from what weapons or armor sets it's best to bring, to if a perfect floor completion is even worth trying for (you're just not getting experience for monsters unkilled and you also take damage for every tile left uncovered) was engaging enough that it had me playing from dawn 'til dusk for a week straight over winter vacation XD. Dungeons are generally very quick and can be knocked out at your leisure, and you don't even get a countdown timer until you start drawing your line, so you can take as much time as you need (except in certain special stages) to draw them. There's even a mid-stage instant-revive mechanic for if you need it. Every stage is theoretically do-able even without those revives (although some seem pretty suspect in that regard), and grinding for them *does* take a while, but it's nice that at the end of the day, if you put in enough time, you can brute-force any problem with time if you're dedicated enough. Now that's all fun (and I really mean it) and dandy (excuse the pun ;b), but not all is well in Dandy Land. The game suffers from a few unfortunate problems, and the sequel suffers from more of them. The principal problem that the main game suffers from (as well as the sequel) is that there is simply a best load out to use. Status effects such as sleep, poison, darkness, and confusion are very common in varying degrees from the mid-game forward, so using the high-level armor that nullifies this stuff is obviously the best choice. Weapons suffer a similar problem, as quite quickly you realize that your biggest priority isn't exploiting enemy racial bonuses (such as a weapon good against the undead), but simply a very high accuracy weapon to cancel out how damn much enemies dodge your moves. Actually being able to hit the target you're going for will make up for not getting that extra damage 99 times out of 100. It's not a game-breaker, and given that it's the biggest problem the original game faces, the original game walks out of this pretty damn unscathed, but it's regardless something that takes some of the fun out of getting new loot once you realize it's there. The bigger problems are mostly present in the sequel. First of all is that the difficulty spike issue the main game uses is increased *significantly*. Some dungeons on the Yamanote Line are FAR harder than others, some farcically so, and its final bosses are an absolute joke in how unfair they are. This is hammered home by the whole "basically one best build" issue, so you feel like there isn't even much you can do to improve your chances. A lot of the difficulty comes from how the gimmick of the sequel is that each stop on the Yamanote Line (i.e. each dungeon) has its own ruleset you need to follow: Either a certain kind of equipment you need to enter it with, or a rule that needs to be followed mid-play or you get an instant game-over (such as being forbidden to heal outside of your free level-up heals). They're simultaneously a very clever way to get a lot more out of the game's limited design without changing things too drastically as well as a massive pain that are sometimes nearly unintelligible due to the poorer localization found in the sequel. You do get some cool new mechanics via mamazon.mom, such as the ability to take along an item that allows you to swap out your consumable items mid-dungeon, and that brings with it a whole new level of strategy. But as it is, the sequel is just a far less polished experience, and it really bums me out just how much of a slog the sequel is compared to the original. The presentation of both games is absolutely excellent. Very charming 2D sprites which are super expressive and delightfully silly. Tons of little references to old Famicom games hidden here and there (or sometimes not even remotely hidden XD) and really fun and silly monster and NPC designs. The music is absolutely stellar, with tons of songs (particularly the special boss tracks in the sequel) being some of my favorite game music I've heard in while. The audio-visuals do a ton to boost up the already great work the writing is doing, and it's just as much of a draw as the writing is, as far as I'm concerned. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Though I certainly have my problems with the sequel (it's more in the Recommended territory, tbh), Dandy Dungeon was an incredibly fun and addicting time I don't regret one second of. I genuinely got a little sad when it was over, not only because of the diegetic farewell they give you in-game, but with the knowledge there was simply no more Dandy Dungeon left to play! Onion Games's games tend to have an issue of being a bit too light on content for the money, but even at full price, Dandy Dungeon is an absolute steal that is super duper worth picking up. It's time for my (quite overdue, given it's the 8th ^^;) year-end wrap-up! Heck, I beat a ton of games this year. 130 of 'em! But now it's time to reflect on the most notable entries on both ends of the quality spectrum.
The Worst: #3: Rockman World 3 (GB) - I played a LOT of Mega Man this year, mostly in April, and while there were some really awesome games in there and some ones I really didn't enjoy, the 3rd GameBoy Mega Man game really takes the cake. Overly damaging bosses that move way too fast, stages full of fast platforms and big animations that cause tons of slowdown, and a massive pile of pixel-perfect jumps made this a horrible chore to play through. Mega Man as a series generally keeps such a good baseline of quality that I'd have trouble calling virtually any of them outright "bad", but this game is one I feel no hesitation calling out as heckin' awful. #2: Maken Shao (PS2) - Last year I played through Maken X: a horrible time of a Dreamcast game that used a console with only 1 joystick to have a first-person sword fighting game. In short, it didn't work, but a lot of the problems it had *felt* like they could've been solved had the game been in third-person. Fast forward to this year and I finally got around to playing the PAL and Japan-exclusive remake of Maken X on the PS2, the one that makes it third-person, and was blown away at just how much being in first-person benefited the first game. Maken Shao is nothing but an embarrassing mistake in not acknowledging what not only makes your own game work, but in what even makes action games fun. If the Maken games are any indication, it's a good thing Atlus generally stayed far, far away from developing action titles after these. #1: Shining Wisdom (Saturn) - When I played through Maken Shao way back in summer, I thought there was NO way anything else could be that bad. Little did I know what was waiting for me come December's TR. Now Shining Force 1 and 2 simply weren't for me, but I can understand their popularity to a certain degree, especially back in the 90's when they came out. Shining Wisdom, on the other hand, is a game so baffling in its construction that I can only summarize it as "an astoundingly bad time". A game that seems to go out of its way to do just about everything (sans the music) wrong, it is undoubtedly not only the worst game I've played this year, but it's also easily one of the worst games I've ever beaten, full stop. ---- The Best: #5: Tales of Xillia (PS3) - It's been a while since I've played through a Tales game, and it was about time I did. I'd heard Xillia was quite good, and those people were absolutely right! Xillia isn't quite my favorite game in the series, but it's damn close. Very interesting and well-fleshed out themes combined with a tightly written & charming main cast made this an absolute blast to play, and the fun combat helped a bunch too~. It's a shame the sequel is such a mess, but the first game is definitely one of the best games in the series that I've played~. #4: moon RPG (Switch) - moon RPG is a bit deceptively named, given that it's pretty clearly an adventure game and not an RPG at all, but regardless it's still a very wild adventure through an RPG-like world. A very clever deconstruction of RPG tropes, moon doesn't so much criticize video games as they are, so much as postulate what they *could* be, and it does it through a delightfully strange and weird world packed with charming characters and locales. I really do hope Onion Games decides to localize and port more of their old games, as even though most (or all) of them aren't as good as moon, there's a lot of greatness to be found in this old gem that finally got localized (and a truly stellar localization it is!). #3: Hermina & Culus (PS2) - In my sudden urge to play just about as many Atelier games this year as I could get my little hands on, I happened upon the existence of this weird little VN spin-off to the main series' third entry. I was able to track down a copy, and I was told it was pretty short, so I grabbed it and played through it all in one sitting. Afterwards, I was glad that I didn't play it in a voice call and glad I played through it in one sitting, because I'm not sure any game has made me cry in one burst as much as this one did (and one I still tear up thinking about). A captivating story about unconventional families/relationships, growing up, and loss, this is a game I love so much that at several points I've considered trying to fan-translate it myself, because more people need to experience this. I'm not sure I'll ever actually get around to that, but damn if I'm not tempted every time I think about it #2: The Missing (Switch) - I've been hearing for years that The Missing is a great game about the trans experience, and I really can't say that those statements were wrong after having played it myself. It does a brilliant job of using both more subtle metaphor alongside more direct explanations to get its messages across to the audience, and I couldn't stop thinking of so many of my real life trans friends (not to mention myself) while I was playing it. A story so raw and true to life that I kinda didn't wanna keep going but also never wanted it to end, this was an awesome game to cap the year off with. #1: Atelier Totori (PS3) - A game I'd already watched a friend play before I played it, I was kinda shocked at myself for just how hard it was still able to hit me. The mechanics of Atelier Totori are a really fun and well-polished refining of what had made Atelier Rorona work so well (a revival of the series' older mechanics). It's a really fun game to play and try to find all the secrets and best battle strategies in. It's also one of my favorite stories I've seen in a video game. A really touching story about family, grief, and growing up that had me in tears over and over with just how bad it hit me. This game, more than any other this year, has definitely been ushered into my list of all-time favorite RPGs I've played. ---- Honorable Mentions/Special (In no particular order): #A: Blue Stinger (DC) - Our own little mini-TR outside of the other TR's! It was a lot of fun going through this together, especially when I got to hear y'all's opinions on it. It was very interesting to see how different from the other regions the Japanese version is, and it even ended up being one of my most enjoyed games I've played on my Dreamcast #B: Doraemon: Nobita To Mittsu No Seireiseki (N64) - This was a surprisingly good, even shockingly good, licensed game on the N64. Now it's hardly the best thing ever, but I was really blown away at just how competent and well-polished the whole N64 Doraemon trilogy is. The reason it's on this list, however, is because it's something that helped me meet on of my new best friends last year. She grew up watching Doraemon on TV, and me streaming this game to our Discord chat (as well as its two sequels) gave us a lot to talk about when we were first meeting, so it will always hold an extra special place in my heart ^w^ <3 #C: Fruits of Grisaia (PC) - Now this is a game I technically saw the end of (well, one of them anyhow) but never actually wrote a review of. It's a visual novel I played through a bit of every weekend with my significant other for months, with her voicing the female characters and myself voicing the male main character. We only actually finished one route of five, so I didn't really feel comfortable writing a full-blown review on it (and there's also such a wild mix of genuinely good and well-done writing mixed in along with some really skeevy/porny stuff that I would've had a monster of a time writing about it anyhow XP). Regardless, it was something that brought us a lot closer together and something we bonded over a lot. We both have very mixed feelings about the quality of it, but it will always hold a very special place in our hearts. As an example of that, she even sent me a really sweet screenshot from one of the epilogues we saw as an extra message after we got engaged in December <3 I wanted to get a clean 130 games beaten this year, and I figured this one would fit the bill very nicely. I bought this game years ago on sale, but just never got around to playing it. I'd heard it was great, but a pretty heavy game narratively, and I was just never quite in the mood for that kind of thing when I had my Switch hooked up. It took me about 5 hours to play through the English version of the game, and then I spent another 1.5 hours going through and getting all of the collectibles I missed.
The Missing is the story of J.J. and her best friend Emily. They take a trip to the Island of Memories on a vacation, but then their first night there, J.J. suddenly blacks out and wakes up to find Emily gone. She takes her stuffed animal F.K. with her as she runs to search for her missing friend, running from a weird monster here and there, only to be struck by lightning in a field and die. However, after a tortured revival process, she's able to regrow her skin and get back up and keep going. So begins J.J.'s quest to find her save her lost friend. It's a little bit of a spoiler to say so, but The Missing's story is a pretty raw narrative about the difficulties of being transgender. As the story slowly unfurls through text messages you get from F.K. in the present as well as ones from the past from J.J.'s friends and family, you slowly learn more and more about the people her and Emily are. They lay the metaphor on pretty thick, but they also aren't afraid to elevate it up from sub-text to just plain text when they need to. It's a heavy story, but it knows to keep a good balance of tone with the friendly and funny dialogue of the text messages alternating with the more serious ones appropriately. It definitely isn't a story for the squeamish, given all the body horror in it, but for anyone looking to perhaps understand their trans friends and family a little better, The Missing is a pretty good step in that direction, and it's one of my favorite stories I've played this year. (It's also made by Swery, of Deadly Premonition, and it makes a lot more sense after playing this why so many of my friends were SO upset with how virulently transphobic Deadly Premonition 2 was given that The Missing predates it by over a year). The gameplay of The Missing is a puzzle platformer where you as J.J. run, jump, and dismember yourself to get over and through obstacles in your way and solve environmental puzzles. Now this isn't a clean or funny game about it, really. You can't' just pull off body parts like it's a silly zombie game. If you need to throw an object, like an arm, at a box to make it fall down, you need to get J.J. mutilated by taking damage to do it. Getting dismembered to just a head, getting your neck broken to flip gravity 180 degrees, being set on fire, and then healing back to normal at the push of a button are all puzzle elements you'll need to get the hang of to get through The Missing. It's a really well put together puzzle platformer, although while I do appreciate what they do narratively, I do kinda wish that the dismembering or instant healing animations were a little faster so the gameplay loop could be a little quicker. The presentation is really beautiful. The game isn't 2D, it's 2.5D, but everything in the graphics still has this pencil-drawn and painted style to it that I loved. The soundtrack is also excellent, underscoring the action excellently. It especially knows how to use a vocal track well, and that in particular is what had me crying near the start and crying a lot more near the end ^^; Verdict: Highly Recommended. I figured I'd be ending 2021 (the video game part of it anyhow) with a bang with The Missing, and damn if I wasn't right. This is easily one of my favorite games I've played all year. It captures the experience of me and so many of my friends and loved ones so well, it's also easily just one of my new favorite games of this/last generation. If you don't mind a game with a heavy story, this is absolutely a game you should not miss out on. I've had this game for quite some time on my NES Mini, and it's a game that I've been meaning to play through for quite some time. I played through the Dawn of Souls remake on GBA when I was younger, but I've always been curious as to just how different the original NES game feels to play. A friend of mine was talking about Final Fantasy a fair bit a few days back, and it gave me the push I needed to finally hook up the NES Mini and give this game a play. It took me about 24 hours to play through the English version of the game with relatively copious save state use (with my 2 fighter, 1 white mage, and 1 black mage party).
The original Final Fantasy's story is a pretty neat one and it's remarkably complex given that it's a game from 1987, when JRPGs were still something so so new to the world. You play the four Warriors of Light, four player-created party members who are here to save the world. The four fiends have taken the power of the four elements, and you need to defeat them and save the day. It's a simple premise, of course, and the signposting can be a little rough at times for exactly where to go, but the conspiracy behind it all is neat to watch play out, and is still entertaining all these years later. Most impressive of all for me was the localization. Sure, the game is from 1987 and the localization is from 1990, but it's still remarkable just how well put together the translation for this is. The gameplay of FF1 is the real showstopper here, and in no small part due to how until very recently every port of this game stripped out all the unique (and admittedly rather bothersome) aspects of its design. Like many early JRPGs, FF1 takes a lot of its base ideas and aesthetic trappings from Western RPGs like Ultima, Wizardry, and most notably, Dungeons & Dragons. Sure, you have a party of four characters, the order of the party they're in dictates how likely they are to draw enemy fire (more likely in front, less likely in back), and you equip armor to get stronger and fight to get experience points to level up. You have six different jobs you can pick from, each having their own strengths and weaknesses (granted some of them have such awful weaknesses they're not worth using at all). Many aspects of FF1 aren't terribly remarkable, even for the time. But the really unique thing about how FF1 plays compared to so many other RPGs of the time is that it eschews any kind of MP system. Instead, you have D&D-style spell charges, and your mages need to rest at an inn (or consume an expensive overworld-only item) to get those charges back. What this means is that you need to be very careful about when you dish out your spells, and really you never have a good opportunity to sling spells about with how large and maze-like the dungeons you're in are. Monsters hit so hard, your most common way of healing will likely be (like I did) always buying back up to 99 healing potions whenever you go back to town, since healing with white magic is such a quickly tapped-out resource. Running from battles, particularly in the later dungeons, is also a very good strategy to conserve resources for similar reasons. Overall I'd certainly put FF1 on the easier side of NES RPGs, but it can be absolutely devious with how the rare wandering packs of instant death-toting mages can be in later dungeons. There are of course no continues, and you need to save at an inn if you want a continue point from where you die, so dying is a really mean punishment. This is especially true with how gratuitously long any battle takes to play out. This game makes Persona 1 or Final Fantasy 7 look like they have fast battle systems with how long they can take. Every attack to every target takes so long to play out that an area of effect spell against the enemy maximum of nine targets can take over a minute between all the animations and loading times for the game's number crunching. That sheer time investment more than anything else is probably the biggest thing that makes FF1 quite so difficult to go back to these days, at least in its original form. The presentation is really pretty, and it still holds up well even now. You have the distinctive profile-view of the party vs. the monsters, with the party's sprites being more simple and the monsters' being more detailed, and the animations that the party do when they attack must've been pretty dang slick looking back in '87. The music is also quite good, although there was a pretty surprisingly small amount of it. There's only one battle theme, for example, with even the final boss not getting his own battle theme. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. FF1 was a very important game historically, and for an 8-bit game it holds up pretty darn well, but that's sorta damning with faint praise with just how brutal so many 8-bit JRPGs are. I'd say that, at a glance, FF1 is certainly one of the 8-bit JRPGs that has aged the best, but with just how BORING it can be to sit even one random encounter, this is a game that will likely only appeal to those very interested in their video game history, or only more devout JRPG fans. This, like Trash Quest, was a $2 game on sale on the Switch eShop that a friend told me about a week or so ago. It looked like a really great little Wonder Boy-like, and I snapped it up as quick as I could. It took me a little under 5 hours to play through the English version of the game with a 94% or so item collection rate.
Aggelos is a pretty standard fantasy story. The land is under attack by dark fantasy forces, and you, the hero, must venture forth and collect the four elemental orbs to gain the power of light and seal it away again. It's very explicitly constructed as a love letter to old Wonder Boy games, but compared to another retro-inspired metroidvania like Alwa's Awakening, this game actually has quite a bit of dialogue in it, and quite charming dialogue at that. It does the job of getting the story going and telling you were to go nicely, and the combination of good character animations and well done dialogue make it a treat to go through despite it not ultimately being all that important. Mechanically this game is certainly a Wonder Boy love letter, as it's a metroidvania more based around moving across a flat world than one with much verticality. Now it isn't as flat and stage-based as something like Shantate often is, but it's a wide open world with a welcome teleport feature to help get around once you hit around the halfway point. You go around, fight monsters, collect money to buy new equipment, and go through dungeons to collect magical orbs and get more powers. You can learn new sword moves from secret scrolls and those combined with the magic powers you get from rings in dungeons help augment your movement and power to explore more and more. That aspect gives it almost a Zelda 2 kind of feeling just as much as it does a Wonder Boy one. The whole mechanic of regaining magic via landing melee hits on enemies is a really cool idea, and it allows them to do some very cool stuff with platforming and puzzle design. It also lets them make some pretty damn brutal (though almost always optional) platforming challenges for those daring enough to try. The game is definitely on the harder end of more modern metroidvanias I've played, but it's generous enough with healing items that it's not too too bad. The presentation is also very nice. The music is very good, and the graphics are pretty and vibrant. It all gives a good retro feeling while still feeling very modern. It's not quite as high quality as something of a Shovel Knight, mind you, but that feeling of "this is what Wonder Boy would be if it were made today" really shines through, just like how Shovel Knight so often feels like a modern day 8-bit Capcom game. Verdict: Highly Recommended. There is very little to complain about with Aggelos. Honestly the only complaint I can really come up with is that I wish it were longer so I could've kept playing it! XD. If you don't mind a bit of a difficult time with platforming, this is a real joy of a metroidvania to play, and it's an absolute steal at $2. After enjoying the first Last Bible game so much, I was super stoked to be able to find this copy (which I'd read was just all around better) for so cheap locally. It took me a while to get to it, but I eventually did! XD. It took me around 17 or so hours (no in-game counter, so I gotta guess) to beat the game on real hardware via my GameBoy Player.
The story of Last Bible 2 is in the far, far future of the first game's world, but ultimately not meaningfully connected beyond some related terms. One day, the return of the monster (not demon, monster) king, who was sealed away 2000 years ago, is foretold, and in order to stop this, the kingdom kills all newborn children in an attempt to keep his herald from fulfilling that prophecy. 15 years later, you, a boy named Yuri, and his childhood friend in their monster village go off to the capital to seek adventure and join the army, ultimately (of course) being pulled into a big fight to save the world. There are a lot more characters, both playable and non-playable, who have better motives and development than the first game. It's still not anything truly amazing, but it was certainly a much more technically put together story than the first. The actual facts of what was happening were much more clear, as well as to why characters were doing what they were doing. I think ultimately the story's setup hurts rather than helps the game in other ways, but I'll get to that later ^^;. The story is pretty darn good and text-filled for a GameBoy game, and with the topics its dealing with really does feel closer to what you'd imagine an "SMT game but for kids" would be. The mechanics of the game are very much like the first one but expanded and enhanced all around in many ways. You still are a main human character with a pool of other human party members, and you still can recruit un-leveling monsters to your side via conversations and fuse those monsters into stronger ones. You can still do monster fusion anywhere via a spell, but the save system has been toned back from "anywhere" to "anywhere that isn't in a dungeon". Those base mechanics have been modified a lot as well. Party members now come and go as story beats dictate, meaning that you need to be careful and modify your supplementary monsters as needed to be able to keep progressing. Monsters are of course fuse-able, but now they can all hold and use items and many can even use equipment too! The monster conversation system has also been significantly enhanced, and it actually feels much closer to the genuine conversational system of its SMT sister games instead of feeling like random A and B choices like Last Bible 1 had. Even the UI is improved, and while still not perfect, it's a lot faster and more convenient to navigate than it used to be (for the most part at least). While those points are all well and good, but unfortunately Last Bible 2 ends up tripping up pretty hard in some places. A lot of it has to do with item management. There are a lot more banks, so it's a lot easier to manage your key items this time, but not only do human party members keep their inventories when they leave the party, but monsters also completely LOSE their inventories upon being fused. This means you've gotta pay attention to what you want whom to have when you're thinking of doing monster fusion. While it's impossible to lose key items this way (the way the game solves that problem is that monsters simply can't hold key items at all), it's very frustratingly easy to forever lose unique equipment because you forgot to de-equip a monster with it, and it's similarly frustrating to lose a key item or unique piece of equipment because someone you didn't realize was about to leave has left for a good while. There are also some very confusing design aspects around the human characters in particular. There are six main human party members who cycle through your party throughout the game, and overall they're not very good. Humans are always the weak link of the party, and the fact that they don't level up when they're not in the group means that you're even more likely to ignore them in favor of monster party members when they come back into the party after having been gone for story reasons. This is doubly true given how this game, like the last one, has a lot of unique special monsters you can find who are REALLY powerful and awesome to use. The game then twists in the final act, and actually robs you of ALL of your monsters by giving you all six human party members who cannot be removed from the party (so incidentally, if you have any items on reserve monster party members when you get that sixth human, their items are now inaccessible since only active party member's items can be accessed). I had to grind for hours to get my all-human party to a place where they could actually fight the final boss because they were all so wimpy, as this game is a good deal harder than the original overall. It's not a game-breaking decision, but it definitely left a sour taste in my mouth after a game that was up to that point better than the first game in basically every way. One aspect that does not disappoint, however, is the presentation. I'd heard the music was just all around better in the second game, even after being so good in the first, and that statement was absolutely right. The graphics have also been improved a bit, still looking quite "GameBoy JRPG"-like, but with the environments and monster sprites looking just a bit nicer than before. They also do a better job of not putting monsters that share a sprite in the same area anymore, so that's one more really nice feature. Verdict: Recommended. Last Bible 2 is another really good GameBoy JRPG. Overall I'd say it's stronger than its predecessors, but a few too many mistakes in its design philosophy regarding its human party members makes it impossible for me to recommend that highly. If you're a fan of JRPGs, you'll probably quite like this game, and it's well worth checking out if you can read Japanese and like some monster-catching action. |
Categories
All
AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
|