I’ve had this game for almost a year now, and I picked it up around when I was playing through the GameBoy SaGa games last year. I only made it through one of them, at the time, so the other SaGa games I had, their SFC counterparts included, got put on the back burner for an indefinite period of time. After finishing Secret of Mana a couple weeks back, I was in the mood for more Super Famicom stuff, and I finally managed to jazz myself up enough for something new that I decided it was high time I try this game out (whether I’d completed the GB SaGa trilogy or not). My final playtime on my save was somewhere around the 35 hours mark, but between resets, redos of stuff, and the frankly dubious accuracy of that in-game timer, I’d much more strongly believe my play time was closer to 40 or even 45 hours to finish the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
As the opening cutscene explains, long, long ago, there was nothing but darkness and turmoil in the world. The three gods of death let havoc reign, and life was nearly impossible. That is until one day, the father of all gods, Elore, put a stop to it. Wielding the power of the ten destiny stones, his chosen human heroes forced the gods of death to stand down, and peace to come to the world for the first time. However, one god of death did not back down. Saruin, the strongest of them, refused to surrender, and only at the end of a long, bloody battle was he finally sealed away, though it came at the cost of the life of Elore’s chosen champion of men. That’s really all you get to set the stage for the very interesting and unconventional story that is the first Romancing SaGa. Though its graphics make it feel like a rom-hack of Final Fantasy IV, the actual gameplay and narrative design of Romancing SaGa is incredibly ambitious and unique for the January of ‘92 (at least on consoles, anyhow). You have your choice of eight different potential starting characters, and after naming them, you drop into their story. A brief introduction to their tale will see you (usually) set on a brief opening quest that shows how they start adventuring around the land, but there isn’t much in the realm of “plot” to Romancing SaGa 1, at least not in the traditional sense. Trading more traditional narrative design elements (or at least their execution) for freedom of choice, the “Free Scenario” system means that you can, and are encouraged to, play Romancing SaGa however you want, really. If you want to explore a location, go there! If you want to recruit a party member, do it! There’s even a sort of in-built morality system, and certain quests and events will happen differently depending on how you’ve led your life on your adventure up until this point. While there are certainly quests and bits of story here and there, it’s almost all entirely optional save for your opening quest and however you end up learning of where the final boss is hiding. I started as the pirate captain Hawk, and after being betrayed and cast out of Pirate’s Coast with his first mate Geraha the lizardman, we traveled the land fighting monsters, hunting for treasure, and righting wrongs where we could. But a lot of that adventure happened just because of where I happened to be at particular times and who happened to be with me. The narrative design of Romancing SaGa 1 allows for a really impressive amount of emergent storytelling for the time, and even though it might not be everyone’s cup of tea, it was a really cool experience that is certainly something novel in the SFC’s early library. The way that Romancing SaGa 1 achieves this degree of freedom and world progression is by something the Event Rank system (or at least it was called that by the time of the PS2 remake). After every battle you fight, the world’s event rank will tick up by one point, and once the event rank gets high enough, certain things start to occur. Higher rank quests will open up, lower rank quests will go away and/or auto-fail, and the monsters of the world will gradually be replaced with stronger replacements as the world ticks ever closer to Saruin’s resurrection (which happens at about 880 battles, for those curious). This is both a strength and a weakness of the game’s design depending on what kind of experience you’re looking for. If you’re looking for emergent gameplay and carving out your own adventure regardless of what happens, then you’re likely going to like the Event Rank system quite a bit. However, if you’re the type of player who MUST see everything in one playthrough and really hate missing out on ANYTHING, no matter how trivial, then this is likely going to drive you crazy and make you have a miserable time. It’s up to you which one of those you’ll end up being, but I’ll end my explanation of the Event Rank system with a bit of advice I found on a Japanese guide site when I was looking for advice just starting out. This game lets you have any kind of adventure you want. Instead of worrying about what you’re missing, before you start looking up any more detailed guide or what not, just do your best to lose yourself in the adventure, and follow fate’s thread wherever it leads you. It’s what the game was specifically designed for, and you’ll end up having a much better time if you play it that way. This is how I approached the game, and I can say without a doubt that it made my time with it far, far better as a result~. Being a SaGa game, the actual RPG mechanics of it are certainly unconventional, but I honestly found them to be quite straightforward and simple once I had the hang of them. It may seems strange at first to have no world map in a game from this era, just picking a new spot on the map to go to once you’ve learned about it in game will become second nature to you very quickly. It will get you in the habit of talking to everyone you see, which will not only help you unlock new areas, but it will also help you bump into new quests much easier too~. While we’ve thankfully discarded the weapon durability system that the GameBoy SaGa games love so much, we’ve expanded the way that Espers would randomly gain stats to a much larger gameplay system. While your party of *six* will indeed have chances to gain weapons on their respective levels and spells only when they’ve used that particular weapon or kind of spell in battle, all of their other stats simply have a random chance of leveling up at the end of each turn-based encounter. Depending on the background you give your character at the start, there are some *slight* leveling biases for different characters and backgrounds, but there is generally nothing one character can do that another can’t. While it’ll certainly take a fair bit of time (time you don’t have, since you have that event rank to worry about) to re-spec someone very skilled with an iron sword to start being a back-row magic user, there’s nothing actually stopping them from doing that and getting good at it just like a caster who’s been doing it since the start of the game. This all amounts to a gameplay experience that is very flexible towards adapting to how you want to play the game. If you’re being conscious of your event rank, of course, there are certainly some best practices to follow, though. Weapon skill level often matters a lot more than your character stats (and stats don’t affect bow damage at all), so sticking with one weapon for a very long time is a really smart and good way to play the game, because even just unequipping a weapon (of which you can eqiup like six at a time) will reset your skill level on it. Armor and defense are VERY important, as this is largely a game of rocket tag. Tanking an enemy hit and then attacking back hard enough that they go down in one or two turns is the recipe for winning most tough encounters, so prioritizing armor over weapons is a very smart strategy. Party members are largely interchangable outside of certain quests that are tied to particular ones, so using someone for whatever role you may need them to fill at the time is a perfectly fine solution, and you don’t need to hunt around everywhere looking for a perfect fit if all you need is a warm body to sling spells and wield a bow. A lot of the freedom in this game can seem extremely foreboding, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for feeling that way, but what makes that MUCH easier to deal with (especially compared to the PS2 remake) is that this game is ultimately just not very difficult. As long as you’re following best practices and not just playing badly, you don’t need to play anywhere remotely close to “optimally” to actually have a fun time and have a chance at beating the game. You actually have all the time in the world to go to the final dungeon in the end, so grinding up at the end of the game until you’ve got the best weapons and armor money can buy is a pretty smart idea once you’re there (and it’ll be a fair bit of grinding, admittedly), but it’s very easy to have a fulfilling and fun adventure just like I did without needing to have a character building walkthrough open the entire time. A guide can be helpful to point you towards those best practices I mentioned and help poke you in the right direction for a quest, sure, but there is absolutely no need to let the freedom of the game stand as an obstacle in enjoying your adventure. The degree to which you can experiment and party build is intimidating, no doubt, but the game does a really good job at setting you up for success to the point that just wandering wherever the wind takes you is still a perfectly valid and fun way to enjoy your adventure without feeling like you’ve created a part that can’t possibly complete the game. The presentation of the game is quite nice, but it’s still an early-life SFC RPG at the end of the day. The music is just the quality you’d expect from a SquareSoft game, of course, and the graphics look pretty enough in their FFIV rom-hack sort of way, but it very much has the “we built an 8-bit game on a 16-bit console” vibe that early SFC RPGs like FFIV and FFV have for sure. My favorite part of the graphic design is how they do the text when people talk, though. Speech bubbles of appropriate sizes pop up directing out of the particular person talking, and it’s a very fun and creative way to show who’s talking without needing to make the player remember a bunch of names or whatever, even if it’s just some random NPC talking at you. The game is also a biiiit buggy here and there. While it’s not a *huge* problem most of the time, there are absolutely places where the instability of the game soured my experience a bit. The biggest example was, when I used a powerful summon item to beat a particularly mean and tough mini-boss near the end of the game, the colors went all weird, and the game froze after the end of the next cutscene I completed. After resetting the console, I went to load my save only to find that my save file, File 1, was deleted! Thankfully my backup save in File 2 was safe, but as successive attempts and trial and error showed, using that summon (on that boss at least) created a RAM issue that wound up deleting a save file in addition to crashing the game. It was such an incredible insult to injury that I could do nothing but laugh at the time (especially since my backup save was so close to that one), and this was the only bug anywhere near this serious or gameplay affecting that I ever encountered, but it was also clearly SUCH a major bug that there was no way I couldn’t mention it here. While that particular instance will likely never happen to you, never forget to save early and save often (and in multiple places!) should you ever decide to play this game on original hardware. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While this is a game I quite enjoyed, this totally falls into the category of “7/10 game that certain people will really love and others will absolutely hate,” as you probably picked up from reading the review. If my explanation of how to follow best practices and how best to lose yourself in the narrative piqued your interest, then this is a game you might well enjoy a fair bit like I did! However, if a lot of those systems sounded nightmarish and my reassurances did little to assuage your worries, then this is probably one worth staying away from. I honestly didn’t really think I’d like this game very much, and that this would be a game I quietly trudged to the end of because I don’t like not finishing games I spend money on, but I was really pleasantly surprised at just how much I enjoyed with my time with it (and proud of myself for actually sitting down and finishing it in the first place XD). Romancing SaGa is definitely not a game for everyone, but for those willing to give it a chance, it’s a novel and ambitious entry in the SFC’s library that will give you an adventure like just about nothing else on the system can.
0 Comments
As with Fire Watch, this is another game I played alongside my wife as a sort of couples activity for us. However, unlike with Fire Watch, this is a game we actually played together! It’s something she’s been talking about playing together for a good few months now, and she bought us each a copy on Steam when it recently went on sale. I really had no idea what to expect from it, but I absolutely trust her judgment when it comes to looking for interesting games for us to get into together~. It took us about 3.5 hours to complete the English version of the game together.
“Bokura” means “us” in Japanese, and has an implication that the people being spoken of (or at least the person speaking) is a boy. Accordingly, Bokura is a story about two boys. The narrative starts with one of them sitting on a train as an adult, on their way home from work. Lost in their thoughts, they start to reminisce about an unforgettable winter they spent with their best friend at the time, and the story begins from that flashback. The thing is, Bokura, as a game, can only be played with two people who each have a copy of the game. It’s impossible to play it by yourself, and each player chooses one of the two boys to play as at the start, and they see the story from their respective boy’s perspective. Most of the story is shown to the both of you, but there are several points where you’re separated and view a scene different from what the other person is seeing (the game even instructs you not to speak to one another during those times apart, which is a very interesting design choice). The game’s main gameplay gimmick ties in heavily with its main themes like this. Seeing the world through your own perspective, and needing to communicate and compromise with those who see the world differently from you. It ties all this together with a much larger theme of dealing with loss, and it’s quite a well told story. It’s got some pacing issues with how long some of the inter-story puzzle sections go on, but it’s by and large a quite well written story that the both of us enjoyed quite a bit~. The gameplay is a co-op puzzle platformer (bold choice for a story-focused indie game, I know ;b). This game isn’t just metaphorically about seeing the world differently. Each player not only has a totally different graphics style for what they’re seeing, but they also have different things in the world that they can see and interact with. A moveable box for one player might be an impassible barrier for the other, while a scary monster for one can be a harmless platforming aid for the other. There are also certain parts of each level that only one player can interact with, making playing through the game twice a not unreasonable choice if you wanted a taste at what the other player got to do while you were in your world. It’s a game that trends surprisingly tough, overall, but it’s a quite fun little puzzle game. I think we finished it a bit faster than some others might because we have a bit more experience with platformers, but that shouldn’t be something that dissuades you from trying it out. This game doesn’t have combat or particularly challenging reflex tests, so even those who struggle with 2D action platformers can absolutely find fun here. My one piece of advice would be that the person with the most experience with platformers should probably choose the boy in the green coat, as we found that he had more difficult platforming stuff than the boy in blue. Similarly, if either of you has issues with seeing blood or gore, then that person should probably play the boy in the blue coat, as the imagery in green’s (while certainly not being a modern Resident Evil game by any means) is a fair bit more graphic than what blue has to deal with. Aesthetically, I think the game succeeds very well at doing what it sets out to do. The normal world along with the two worlds the boys see are all set apart very well in their graphical styles, and it aids the narrative themes and gameplay very well. The game has some slight net code issues here and there, and you can certainly see some weird screen tearing and graphical glitches here and there when things get a bit more animation intensive, but it’s nothing that made the game more difficult to play (even with her on the east coast of the US and me here in Japan). The graphical style is very pretty pixel art, and the music is quite good too~. Verdict: Recommended. I’d like to recommend this game more highly, but it’s a fair amount of little things that keep me from doing that. For sure, it’s far from the only well put together story-focused indie puzzle platformer out there, and that’s certainly part of it, but the fact that you NEED a partner to play through it with in co-op is another big part of it that’s going to be a meaningful hurdle for a lot of people. Add that in with that you also need to have some kind of voice communication ability (whether it’s over Discord or just sitting across from each other) to do a lot of the puzzles, and that’s one more thing that makes this a bit more difficult to engage with simply by the nature of how the game was designed. All that said, if you’re willing to spend a little over 10 bucks (and that’s when it’s not on sale) for something that you and a buddy can spend an afternoon doing together, this is a really great way to do it~. This is a game I’d heard great things about for years, but I’d never really put much priority on ever playing it. However, it recently went on sale for two bucks, so my wife picked it up to play through, and I figured what better time to pick it up and play through it myself than when I have her to talk about it with. It took me about 4 hours to play through the English version of the game.
Fire Watch is the story of a man named Henry who takes a job in one of Wyoming’s national parks doing exactly what the title of the game says: watching for fires. You follow his time there during the several months he’s assigned there, seeing the things he gets up to on the job as well as following his radio-enabled relationship with another of the fire watchers, Delilah. I hesitate to give more away than that, because a lot of Fire Watch’s story is really just going to hit better when experienced firsthand rather than being told about it. Though there is a slight degree of optional content to engage in, this is a game at the very least adjacent to the “walking simulator” genre, so the story is really what you’re here to see in the first place. And that story is done really well! The dialogue writing is excellent, with Henry and Delilah feeling so much like real people in the way they talk. The end result is a game that does a great job discussing guilt, regret, and the passing of time. Even though I don’t feel I relate to Henry on a direct level very closely at all (he’s just a very different person than me), the larger story beats were something I had no trouble seeing myself in at all. It’s a real shame that this dev team is probably never going to get a chance to actually make another game, because the way they execute the storytelling here is top notch, and as far as modern story-over-gameplay games I’ve played, this is easily near the top of the pile. The gameplay itself is, as I mentioned before, really nothing terribly special, as it’s basically all just walking places and pressing the button on stuff at the end of the day. You have general objectives to complete, sometimes they require a little bit of scavenger hunting via the map & compass you’re given to navigate, and there are some optional places to explore here and there, but this absolutely isn’t a game you’d go to because you heard the gameplay was stellar on its own without the story. I absolutely think that the gameplay does a good job of putting you in Henry’s shoes, at creating the correct atmosphere for the relevant story beat and all that, but this really is basically a walking sim at the end of the day, so don’t go in expecting some narrative-focused survival game or anything like that (not that I’m sure why you’d have that impression in the first place <w>). The presentation of the game is really well done. Just as the gameplay does, it compliments the narrative very nicely from the graphics to the sound design (not to mention the excellent voice acting. It’s so well done, it’s honestly hard to imagine the game looking much different while still having such an affective narrative. My only *slight* issue would be that, with the way the color palette of the game is done, it can be a bit hard to actually find your way through the forest sometimes. It’s an uncommon problem, sure, but it’s one I encountered often enough that it felt wrong to not mention it here. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a game that absolutely lived up to the hype. The normal price is a bit steep for a four hour game, I’ll admit, but if you can get past that (or get it on sale), this is an excellent narrative to spend an evening with. If you’re a fan of narrative-focused games, this is for sure not one you wanna pass up on, because you won’t be disappointed. (A very special thanks goes out to my friend Robin for buying the game for me when I was having payment processing issues on Steam, as I was like 7 cents short of affording the game on sale <w>) This is a game I’d heard a lot about as a kid, and I even bought it on the Wii Virtual Console well over a decade ago. I played a bit of it, but found it too awkward and difficult, so I put it down and never ended up returning to it. I’ve tried it once or twice again since then, but it’s never really gelled with me, and I’d grown quite the negative impression of it over the years. Listening to some friends talk about their experience with the Mana series convinced me, though. I’d owned this game long enough, and I was going to sit down and finally finish this thing! Playing on my Super Famicom Mini, it took me around 19 hours to beat the Japanese version game without abusing save states (though sometimes using a walkthrough).
Secret of Mana follows the story of a young boy who, when playing in the forbidden area behind his tiny village, discovers a mysterious sword calling to him. Pulling it from its place in the ground, he finds the world around him suddenly filled with monsters! After fighting his way back to his village, the villagers accuse him of inadvertently starting the end of the world by pulling the blade from its place, and they quickly banish him forever. So starts the journey of our intrepid young hero who soon meets both a young girl and a strange fairy who also come along for the journey. Secret of Mana’s English story is a further truncated version of an already very cut down story (as this game had quite a hectic development cycle). The original Japanese version that I played does have a bit more character to the dialogue and certain details are a little more fleshed out, but it still bears the scars of the some 40% of the story they allegedly needed to cut to get this final product out the door. There are a few themes or interesting (or even surprisingly heavy) plot beats here and there, such as how the empire ends up falling or how all three of our protagonists are missing parental figures in their lives. There are some very strange parts here too, such as the “Republic” only having a king as its government, or some NPCs complaining about how the empire used to be so good and peaceful until the war 15 years ago despite an empire, by its very nature, being a political entity founded upon an idea of inherent supremacy above subjugated groups (and there’s very little to suggest that these NPCs are being ironic or speaking from misguided viewpoints). Regardless, by the halfway point, it all just feels like a rush to the finish as nothing is really dwelt on enough to form much of any larger cohesive messaging. The story isn’t bad, per se, but it’s certainly nothing special, and unlike a lot of other SquareSoft games from this time, the story really isn’t a big reason to come to this game. The gameplay is part turn-based RPG, part 2D top-down Zelda game, and it frankly manages to miss most of the fun aspects of both. The gameplay as a whole is what I found the most difficult aspect of the game to tolerate, and this was quite the slog for most of the game, even after I’d gotten more to grips with the combat past the few several hours. Your melee attacks function via a charge system, and you’ll need to wait several seconds between strikes if you want your attacks to have any power at all. However, just hitting the enemy isn’t enough to land a strike. For both you and the enemy, you have innate hit and dodge percent chances, so it’s actually a dice roll behind the scenes that dictates whether a well aimed and charged melee attack will hit. On top of that, enemies (especially bosses) have very unclear hit boxes, dodge animations, and invincibility frames in between their animations and attacks, so combat is often a very messy rinse and repeat exercise of slowly pummeling an enemy in between periods where they happen to be invincible. It makes for a really unsatisfying combat experience that makes every fight feel like an endless waiting game until you can get lucky enough to kill your opponent, and that’s especially frustrating for the enemies that continuously spawn full-health copies of themselves. While the boy can only use melee attacks, the girl has defense and support magic, and the fairy has attacking and debuff spells. Sure, magic attacks (both yours and the enemy's) never miss, but it takes so long to cast them and the enemy is invincible during them that most of what they do is just slow the already dull combat down to an awful crawl. Additionally, your own reserves of MP are very limited for a large chunk of the game, so this makes using it to fight normal enemies a very unwise choice, especially with how invaluable magic so often is for fighting the very annoying to hit bosses. Even when you have the MP to actually use spells effectively without worrying about running out of juice, you need to spend time grinding up spells levels to make them actually effective. While your normal attacks and stats increase just by killing enemies, and the level and money curves of the game are pretty reasonable as long as you just kill most things you see, magic only levels up by repeatedly using that specific type of spell a bunch of times. You’ll REALLY want things like your ice and moon spells at max power as much as you can, so that means going to an inn, resting, going to a battle area to spam you spells until you run out of MP, and then doing it all over again until the spells you want are maxed out. It cumulatively takes hours, and there’s just nothing fun about it for how necessary a part of the gameplay loop it is. Weird design choices like this abound in this game. On the lower end, you have annoyances like how necessary armor is, so should you miss a merchant (or should a merchant be hidden from you in an out of the way location) and you miss the next armor upgrade, you’ll start getting absolutely mulched with just how tough the next area’s enemies are. Then you have your consumable items, which you can only carry four of at a time, so your healing and such are really reliant on your magic because you just don’t have the pockets to carry around large amounts of healing candy. That in and of itself isn’t much of a problem, balancing-wise, and you can always find more items in chests dropped by enemies. These chests, however, THEY are where the problem lies, as they are just so vindictively mean as to be pointless. Whether you have space for the item inside or not, a chest disappears once you open it. You’re likely going to be conserving your items anyhow, so most chests will have useless stuff you need to throw away anyhow or just useless equipment you out-leveled ages ago. A lot of the time, however, chests are trapped! This can range from a little punch to the face, to health-bar shredding poison effects (particularly nasty in the first half of the game), or even instant death for the character who opened the chest! You only can carry four revive items at a time, remember, and you don’t get the revive spell until almost the very end of the game. This makes opening chests dropped from monsters a proposition so dangerous as to be pointless. Anything not harmful from them is almost certainly useless, and anything harmful from them is SO bad as to be a potential catastrophe. Outside of messing with the player, it is totally beyond me why the trapped chests are in the game at all, and they feel like a very half-baked mechanic. One of the most annoying mechanics, however, are your AI party members. Your party members don’t *have* to be AI controlled, granted, and if you’ve got some friends, they can hop in and take control of the other characters. You can even press Select and switch between them on the fly if you’d like. However, there are SO many compromises to the rest of the gameplay to accommodate these party members that I frequently found myself wishing that they weren’t there at all, and I simply had one character who had all of these spells and such. On the level of outright compromises, there’s first the camera. The game needs to accommodate two or three people potentially playing the game at once, so it can’t just focus on one character all the time. As a result, you need to get VERY close to the edge of the screen to actually scroll it, meaning you’re quite vulnerable to enemies just off screen “seeing” you first and working in a cheap shot before you can react to it. This makes the already slow, plodding combat and exploration even more slow as you’re force to very frequently tiptoe forward lest you get ganked by an unlucky enemy placement. On top of all of that, your AI allies have some very mixed pathing abilities. This means you’ll very frequently be swapping control to them or going back and forth as you try to un-stick them from whatever pillar or bush they’ve decided to take the wrong path around. While I do appreciate how you can adjust their AI on scales of how aggressive you want them to be as well as the distance they should keep from enemies, I found that I was nonetheless babysitting them constantly while I tried to get them close enough to actually aggro on enemies (or pull them away from things they’d decided needing to be killed at once). Sure, you can go into their respective AI menus and swap which preset they’re fixed to depending on what you’re fighting or where you’re exploring, but that involves going into the tedious menu system. To facilitate the simultaneous RPG multiplayer, you’ve got an unconventional menu UI where a ring appears around each player. You can press Y for the one of the player you’re controlling or X for one of the AI’s menus, and there is nothing quick or simple about going through these things. It’s not the worst thing in the world, sure, but it’s very quickly a huge pain in the butt to have to constantly change their AI behaviors, so I usually didn’t bother. This even extends to just changing your own weapon as well. The game has eight different weapons you can use, find upgrades for, and level up in proficiency in, but you NEED to go into your respective ring menus if you want to change which weapon you’re using. This wouldn’t be such a huge annoyance if you didn’t need to switch between the sword, axe, and whip so often to cut down particular barriers or cross certain whip-able gaps. Given that not one but *both* shoulder buttons are completely unused for normal gameplay, it is absolutely beyond me why they didn’t just let you hot-swap between weapons using R and L. If I had to guess, it’s probably down to some programming hurdle that couldn’t be overcome, but no matter what the actual reason is, it doesn’t make switching weapons any less annoying. The gameplay experience of Secret of Mana isn’t a particularly difficult one most of the time, but good gods is it boring. Mechanic upon mechanic piles up to make an experience that feels as unrewarding as it is frustrating. The only times it feels particularly great is when things have gotten *so* simple that you can just breeze through enemies because you don’t need to deal with the most annoying design decisions at this particular moment. The aesthetics of the game are decent enough for 1993, but they’re nothing special, and as is also the case with the writing, they certainly bear the scars of something that was in development for so long. Sprites are relatively nice looking, but animations are often very simple for both players and enemies alike. Despite this, the game still gets quite bad slowdown problems, and only 3 enemies can ever be on screen at a time lest the game slow down to an impossible crawl. That can even turn into commands for your AI allies to use spells getting eaten while their AI and the gameplay action catch up from whatever was happening at the inopportune moment you decided to fire. The music is at least pretty good. That’s one area where even a much rougher gameplay experience like this doesn’t let you forget that it’s a SquareSoft game. It’s a nice silver lining to a very dark cloud. Verdict: Not Recommended. There were times where I was enjoying this game okay, but those times felt more like happy accidents than actual high points of design. The general pieces of the experience of Secret of Mana make for a consistently boring and frustrating gameplay loop that is very hard to recommend to really anyone. Like Shining Force that I played a couple years back, this is one I can kinda see why people may’ve enjoyed it back then, but even still, the problems it has are so great that it’s kinda hard to believe it didn’t have more detractors back then. Even if it was great back in its day, Secret of Mana is a game that has aged like milk in the sun, and it’s one you’re far better off avoiding in favor of one of the better games in its series. Somewhat continuing all of the Pokemon I played last year (though without the looming responsibility of using the Pokemon within them to beat Pokemon Stadium games XD), this is a game I played a TON when I was in grade school. It’s also, however, a game that I never played through with a proper Pokemon team of six, and it’s also a game that my partner really wanted to parallel play together. This made for a great opportunity to give this a replay for the first time in nearly 20 years, and seeing my partner’s experiences in her version of the game was also a really fun time~. It took me about 33 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware (with a team of Blaziken, Claydol, Sharpedo, Plusle, Skarmory, and Shiftry).
The third Pokemon game starts and plays out very similarly to the previous two. You’re a young person (you get the choice of a boy OR a girl this time, carrying forward the trend started in Crystal) going out on an adventure to become the regional Pokemon League champion. You arrive in the Hoenn region having just moved there from Johto to here where your father is a gym leader, and you quickly set off on your quest to be the best like no one ever was. It tries a few new things with the narrative writing, like how we’re not fighting Team Rocket anymore or how there are a few more characters with a *little* more meat to them, but it’s by and large very similar to how these games had always been up to that point. That absolutely isn’t a bad thing, mind you, as I certainly don’t mind a Pokemon game with a thread bare story if it’s otherwise fun to play, and this one absolutely fulfills the being fun to play. Gameplay-wise, it’s still Pokemon. You catch them, you train them, you fight trainers, win badges. It’s something you’re almost certainly already well familiar with by now, and the third generation of Pokemon doesn’t really rock the boat too much on the fundamentals and plays very similarly to the first two generations. That said, while some of the more fundamental problems with Pokemon still haven’t been cleared up yet (most prominently, the stat a move scales off of is still tied to the move’s type and isn’t particular to the move itself), there are a LOT of quality of life changes as well as general polish to the design that makes this game WAY easier to go back to than its GameBoy predecessors. The game as a whole is so much easier to play now. You still have an inventory limit, yeah, but it’s far larger than Gold & Silver’s was, and inventory management is far less of a constant burden. You also no longer need to swap your Pokemon boxes manually, so you can catch Pokemon to your heart’s content without ever needing to worry about running out of space in your computer. Lastly, while it’s still not perfect, the running shoes are a VERY welcome addition to the bicycle to make getting around a lot faster and easier. Sure, it sucks that you still can’t run inside, but being able to zoom around in outdoor areas really helps the pace of the gameplay significantly. As for the topic of polishing design, the overall experience has been fine tuned very significantly from the previous game, and a lot of more burdensome design choices of past games have been either ironed out or removed entirely. On the topic of the latter, wild Pokemon no longer run away from you unless they’re one or two very special cases, which makes catching Pokemon FAR less of a burden than it once was. Additionally, while there are still 8 HMs in this game, far less of them are actually needed to progress, so you need to spend a lot less time worrying about juggling HM users or trying to find space for crappy moves in your team. The biggest and most important change, however, is not only all of the new Pokemon, but all of the new moves. We’re still not quite there yet, but the moves added in these games make SO many Pokemon types SO much more viable now that they actually have move sets. Poison and bug types are still SOL, sadly, but most other types with really weedy move sets (especially dark types) are finally far more usable than they’d ever been, and the game balance is SO much better for it. We’ve still got some important stuff to clean up, but we’re at least at the point where Pokemon isn’t just fun to play, it’s easy to play, and that’s a milestone worth celebrating in and of itself. Just about every main line Pokemon game is a big presentation upgrade, and this game is no exception. With the power of the GBA, Pokemon look bigger, better, and more detailed than ever before. The GBA’s sound chip is infamously under powered compared to the graphics, but this game still manages to have a really fun and memorable soundtrack either way, even if it’s not the best the music would ever be. Verdict: Recommended. There are still some quality of life features and design shortcomings that make Pokemon games from this era a chore to go back to compared to more recent entries, there’s no doubt about that, but the advances we’ve made by this point really cannot be understated. If you’re looking for some retro Pokemon fun, this is a really good game to sit down with, even if all the kinks in the series still wouldn’t be ironed out for another game or two. The last of the games that I played on my recent efforts to clear through some of my PC backlog, this is yet another game that I was curious about for ages, bought it on sale years and years back, and have only just finally gotten around to playing XD. I’m not usually one for FPS games, let lone one tied to Ubisoft, but the premise of this one had me so curious and the praise it received was so great that I just had to check it out. It took me about 5.5 hours to finish the game on normal mode.
Call of Juarez: Gunslinger follows Silas Greaves, an old cowboy just looking to stop into town and get a drink. Once he sits down at a table, he strikes up some conversation and the patrons quickly recognize his name as one of a famous gunslinger about which there are no shortage of unbelievable tales. Demanding stories straight from the source, Silas begins telling them stories of his younger days, and that is where you, the player, come in. Inspired by the way that Bastion’s narrator affected its gameplay, the narrative conceit of Gunslinger is that you are playing through the stories Silas is telling as he tells them, and revisions to the story or folks jumping in with their own details will change the game as you play it. It’s a super cool way to design a game, and they pull it off really well here. Being a game about the old west, there are certainly marks of the genre (especially regarding racism), but I think the game does a pretty darn good job of striking a balance between making the characters feel appropriate to the world they’re in while also incorporating many more modern ideas about the culture and stories of the old west. This is a game whose story is a love letter to old west fiction, and it has a lot of fun playing with the notion of storytelling and how the stories we tell affect our perceptions of both history and the present. It’s simultaneously a big, dumb cowboy story that features every famous and infamous cowboy who ever graced a Hollywood screen as well as a thoughtful contemplation on what these kinds of stories mean to us. It’s not the most deep dissection of those things, sure, but it does a great job at what it’s trying to do, and I loved every minute of it. The gameplay is pretty standard for an FPS of this time, but it has a few things here and there to make it special. On the more typical end, you can carry two guns at a time, you’re going through levels following objective markers and shooting enemies as they come, and you even have a bullet time mode you can activate once you’ve killed enough enemies. This definitely has the feelings of a budget title, in a sense, with how relatively few guns it has and how often locations are reused, but both of those aspects serve larger purposes. The guns are all relatively cowboy appropriate, for starters, and the reuse of locations is a bit more than meets the eye, and it’s honestly an aspect of the narrative device that I respected the most by the time I was done with it. On the more special end, you have little six-shooter inspired skill trees (which isn’t that unique, sure), as well as how the story changes depending on the flow of the narration as I mentioned earlier. The most unique part of the gameplay is how they’ve conceived boss fights in this game. In grand cowboy movie fashion, no matter how many unimportant enemies get taken down, a showdown against a bad guy almost always ends in a one-on-one showdown of reflexes. The way the game does this is with you seeing Silas’s hip holster and his hand as well as the enemy in front of you. Your goal here is to focus the reticle on the right hand side with your right stick (or mouse) on your enemy’s head to increase your zoom in for an easier shot, and you simultaneously use your left stick (or WASD on the keyboard) to keep Silas’s hand near his gun to increase the speed you draw your weapon at. The way you kill normal enemies already gets you points and EXP for both score and leveling up, and the better you do in these duels, the more EXP you’ll get for them. You get an extra big bonus if you win the duels honorably (by letting your enemy draw first), though it’s obviously a lot harder to do that. It’s a bit of a jank mechanic, but they do some really fun stuff with it and it helps the silly cowboy-ness of it all come alive that much more. My one main comment here is that these work WAY better with a controller, and I ended up being really glad that I still had my Xbone controller plugged in, because I’d play the normal game with my mouse and keyboard and then swap to the controller (which is a really nice, seamless transition) as soon as the duels started, because these control WAY more easily with joysticks than they do with the WASD keys and mouse. The aesthetics are really fun as well. The voice acting is really well done as is the sound design in general, with lots of fun, very cowboy-feeling music underscoring the action as it happens. The graphics also fit the game really well too. They’ve gone for a cell-shaded, vaguely realistic graphics style that gives the whole game a somewhat comic book feel without feeling like a comic book game. It lends itself really well to the hyper-reality of the action at hand, and it makes the whole thing that much more fun. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a really awesome game! I went in expecting to like it okay, and I came away loving it. If what I described about the storytelling intrigues you, or you’re someone who likes westerns and/or FPS games, this is absolutely not one you want to miss, because it’s a real treat on all levels (and I’m saying that as someone who’s never even seen a western movie <w>). Like Pulse which I played earlier in the year, this is a game that I actually Kickstarted aaaages ago back in high school but just never got around to finishing. As was also the case with Pulse, I figured it was high time that I actually sit down and finish this game, because I’ve certainly owned it for more than long enough to justify it XD. It took me about 7.5 hours to finish the game doing just about everything I possibly could, though I’ll freely admit I would’ve finished it a LOT sooner had I not been stubborn about not using a guide when I got stuck.
Dropsy is a story of the titular character, Dropsy the clown with a quite scary face. As the intro cutscene shows, his life used to be happy and fun, loving being at and being in his family’s circus every day, but it all came to a horrifying end one day when the circus tent burned down and his mother lost her life in the accident. Now living in the old, dilapidated circus tent with his dad and little doggy, Dropsy sets out to make a better place of a world that fears his face (and maybe just do something incredible while he’s at it). Dropsy’s “story” is a weird thing to write about, as this game actually has no text at all. Outside of the title card itself, you’ll never see any text in the game until the credits roll, not even in the save menus or title screen. Characters communicate with speech bubbles that have pictures in them depicting what they’re talking about, and that’s how you as Dropsy interact with the world around you. The story that is there is remarkably well put together despite these self-imposed limitations, though it does fall a bit short, in my opinion. While the game’s main message of how doing good deeds brings good deeds back to you in return (and of course that you can’t judge a book by its cover) is one I quite like and think it does a good job at portraying, but they really fumble it in the last hurdle. I won’t spoil what the ending is here, but in taking the path they do for the ending, they end up muddying the waters of what the entire game is meant to say, and it just doesn’t logically parse with what the story has been up to that point. I’m not sure if they even are purposefully trying to have a point or message with the ending they went for, and they may’ve just been trying to be weird/shocking, but at any rate, I think choosing a different conclusion would’ve done the game a world of good. As things are, I think the story is certainly good, but decidedly not great. The gameplay of Dropsy is a point and click adventure game through the island that Dropsy calls home. Exploring the circus, the forest, the military base, and the nearby city, you’ll control Dropsy as he goes around trying to progress the main plot as well as give hugs to as many (consenting) folks as he’s able to (with the game’s dedicated hug button!). Hugs are your side objective, and Dropsy will slowly decorate his room with more and more drawn pictures of those whom he’s made friends with. A neat feature is that Dropsy isn’t alone on his quest. There’s his clown make-up wearing doggy you start the game with, but you’ll also acquire a mouse friend and a bird friend too, and swapping between them to accomplish tasks only they respectively can is a neat way many of the puzzles are designed. However, this is at the end of the day a point and click adventure game, and this game is absolutely not free from the pit falls this genre so often finds itself in. While I was able to do *most* things without consulting a guide, I ultimately had to, as some puzzles are just that unclear on how you’re meant to do them. This is made an even more serious issue, of course, by the whole “no text” gimmick the game has going for it. This means that you are entirely on your own for figuring out what items do and sometimes what they even are, and I think the game really would’ve benefited from *some* kind of way to analyze items in your inventory to help give the player a good kick in the right direction when they needed it. It’s far from the hardest point and click out there, but it’s certainly not going to convert anyone who already doesn’t gel well with this genre. The presentation of Dropsy is wonderfully surreal and one of the coolest things about it. While it’s especially the case for Dropsy himself (with all of his weird, wiggly animations and mannerisms), the whole world is populated by strange and delightfully stylized people who act and move like caricatures come to life. The sound design adds to this surreal nature very well, and seeing what there is to see in the world you’re adventuring in is definitely one of the biggest highlights of playing Dropsy. Verdict: Recommended. While this is certainly not one of my favorite games, and I certainly have my reservations about the story, this is still a game I had quite a good time with even when I was really stuck. The message of value kindness in the face of adversity is done in a way I found very endearing, and the unique approach to storytelling and surreal world design help make it an adventure that’s easy to really get into and want to see the next step of as soon as you can. If you’re a fan of the genre, this is totally one worth trying, but if you’re really turned off by point’n’click games, this is probably one to just watch a Let’s Play of instead of playing it yourself. This is a little game I’ve been meaning to play through for ages, but I’ve never really gotten around to it until now (and receiving it for free on the Epic Games Store also made for a very nice excuse as well, of course ;b ). Just like I really love metroidvanias, I’m also a huge fan of 2D Zelda-like games, so this was something right up my alley from the start. It took me about 2.5 hours to beat the game and toy around with the post-game endless mode a little too.
As the title suggests, this is a game about Turnip Boy (a boy who’s a turnip) who’s unhappy with taxes. When the evil Mayor Onion uses some obscure tax law nonsense to steal his green house, Turnip Boy sets out on a document-burning adventure to get his green house back and take out the evil mayor. The game is extremely silly and wears its nonsense proudly upon its sleeve (as the title is ever so helpful demonstrating). There isn’t *nothing* behind its silly writing, though it is a little hard to deduce if the anti-tax/anti-government messaging of the game is more coming from the devs being anarchists or if they have more libertarian leanings. At any rate, just enjoying the nonsense and the delightfully strange world of the game is good fun for the few hours of fun the game will give you, and that’s more than enough for me. The gameplay is a pretty straight forward 2D top-down Zelda like. You get several weapons and tools that you’ll use to solve puzzles both optional and mandatory, and there are lots of NPCs to talk to and do little sub-quests for, but this game isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel or anything. The combat was surprisingly challenging for what I otherwise would’ve expected, but this is far from a terribly difficult game. As long as you aren’t afraid to take your time with fights, bosses are generally really good about giving you health mid-fight to make even the tougher fights nothing too daunting. It’s a perfectly competent Zelda-like that doesn’t outstay its welcome, though it doesn’t have much to set it apart from better, longer games other than its zany concept. The presentation is, like the rest of the game, perfectly adequate. The art style is simple and not flashy, but just stylized enough to be memorable where it counts. The music is similarly nothing to write home about, but it fits the mood of the respective locations nicely nonetheless. Not much to go wild with praise over, but not much to really complain about either, really. Verdict: Recommended. I feel like I’ve repeated myself a million times saying this already, but this game is a short, sweet, and to the point that does a good job not outstaying its welcome. If it were any longer, I think they’d be laying the joke on way too thick for how much mileage their premise ultimately has, but the devs were smart in making something juuuust long enough that it doesn’t feel tiresome. If you’re a fan of the genre, this will be a fun thing to spend an afternoon on as long as you don’t expect anything super hilarious or life changing. I’m a big fan of metroidvanias, and this was one I hadn’t heard of, but a friend of mine is a big fan of. They happened to have a spare key for it lying around, and they very graciously gave it to me so I could play through it! Other than the bits of praise I heard from that friend, this was honestly a game I’d just never heard of. Judging from all the friends who jumped in call with me to watch me play it and how much they talked about loving it, it seems it’s certainly a popular one, and now that I’ve finished it myself, I can certainly see why! I played through the game three times. Once on normal mode and getting the good ending, which took about five hours. After that, I did a “Boss Mode” (this game’s version of the old Castlevania’s Julias Mode) playthrough that took about 2.5 hours, and then I finished it off with a hard mode playthrough to get the true good ending (which can only be gotten on hard mode after you’ve beaten the game once), and that was another 3.5 hours.
Lost Ruins is the story of an unnamed Heroine (who is simply called such throughout the game), who is summoned suddenly into some, well, mysterious and unfamiliar ruins. She has no memories of her life before being summoned, but judging from her clothes, she assumes she used to be some kind of school girl. A helpful witch quickly informs her that she is only the most recent to be summoned here, and that the evil Dark Lady is summoning all sorts of souls from other worlds to serve as sacrifices for a dark, ultimate ritual. With not a ton of help from her witch friend, our heroine sets off to take down the Dark Lady’s subjects and perhaps even get home in the end. The writing is nothing special, but it’s fine silly fun for what it is. The character writing is funny and weird in ways that make its small yet colorful cast charming in their own absurd ways, and that’s especially evident in the Boss Mode. It’s a lot less horny than you’d think a metroidvania about school girls would be, which was nice, though that’s not to say it’s not horny at all, of course XD. It’s at a perfectly tolerable level of it for me, and I found the writing fun for what it was and a good motivator for the adventure~ (clearly good enough to get me to go through it three times, at least XD). The gameplay of Lost Ruins is a 2D action/adventure metroidvania, so there’s going to be a lot of familiar elements for anyone even remotely familiar with the genre. However, there are a few interesting things that this game does that makes it stand out among the crowd of other high quality metroidvanias. First of all, this game has no mobility upgrades. There’s *some* recursive exploration, sure, but beyond going back to tackle trials or puzzles you just couldn’t beat the first time, the game is honestly fairly linear if you choose to play it that way, as the only thing keeping you from progressing are the bosses blocking your way and not the upgrades you might’ve otherwise gained from them. On that note, the game is actually very sparse on the upgrades full stop, really. You start with 20 HP and 20 MP, and by the end of the game your base stats will, at most, be 35 HP and 30 MP. The weapons, magic, and armor you find as well don’t really scale in power too much (though there certainly is *some* scaling to them), and you really end up playing through the whole game at a very similar durability to how you started it out as. You’ll find better weapons with different sorts of passives, you’ll find armor and trinkets that give different sorts of passives both defensive and offensive, and you’ll even get the ability to wear more pieces of armor/trinkets at once, but you don’t really play the game that differently at the end than you did at the start. This particular aspect of the game makes it particularly fun to replay, I think, as it’s both not terribly long *and* you’re not really getting much of a downgrade in your arsenal when you restart. As my hard mode playthrough that took 1.5 hours less than my original normal mode playthrough indicates, the skills and strategies you pick up from one playthrough carry over very easily to other playthroughs, and the different modes and little modifiers they give you make for some very fun challenge runs if you’re up to tackle them (such as Witch Mode, where you can’t use anything but magic spells the entire game). The aesthetics of the game are very pretty, and the pixel art is done very well. Both in the VN-style portraits for when the girls are talking as well as the animations on attacks, you can really tell a lot of time and effort went into bringing Lost Ruins’s cast to life. Several friends unfamiliar with the game actually thought I was playing a Momodora game, which is high praise in and of itself so far as I’m concerned. The music is also very fun and fits the mood of the game very well, and it all makes for a really good and fun time~. Verdict: Highly Recommended. As far as more action-focused metroidvanias go, this is a pretty damn good one! The story is fun, and the action and exploration is even better. Heck, the fact that I played through it so many times is in and of itself a testament to just how fun the game is to play. If you’re a fan of the genre, then Lost Ruins is definitely one you don’t wanna miss out on. This is one of a handful of games I backed on Kickstarter well over a decade ago and just never got around to properly playing. My girlfriend of the time and I used to play games like this, very artsy, colorful stuff, all the time back then, and this was one we just never got around to playing together back then. This is a game that's pretty poorly documented online (being a not super stand-out indie game from a decade+ ago), but with how short the HowLongToBeat time on it was, I figured I might as well sit down and finally finish the thing. Playing with a controller, it took me about an hour and a half to finish the English version of the game while getting like 20 out of 50 collectibles (though I more often than not wasn't really trying to find them, admittedly ^^;).
Pulse is the story of Eva, a girl living on a tropical island who has set out to do the trial that all members of her village do to enter adulthood. Eva, however, has generally been kept from ever attempting this, and from her family's perspective, for a very good reason: She's blind. Only able to "see" the world when it's illuminated via pulses of sound in the environment, she nonetheless sets out on a boat to do the trial, and ends up completing a lot more than that in the process. Pulse isn't a super world-changing game narratively, but it's still a well enough written story. It can be a bit hard to follow at times with just how experimental and odd the storytelling can be, but it's still a nicely written tale of facing your fears and not letting other people decide what your limits are. Gameplay-wise, Pulse is something between an adventure game and a walking simulator. You navigate the world in first-person, and you're really just getting from one end of the level to the next. While there is some platforming and even a stealth section or two to hide from monsters that live on this island, the actual interactions with other entities is (thankfully) quite a small part of the game. Aided by furry little critters called Mokos (which are the only thing that Eva can completely "see" no matter where they are in the level), you can toss them around to solve puzzles or just create pulses to see the world with to progress forward. Really, just navigating levels in and of itself is the game's biggest challenge for the player, as just seeing what's around you can at times be extremely disorienting with both how your "sight" works as well as how levels are designed. The stealth sections involving monsters kinda sucks, but it's short enough that it's hard to give the game too much flak for it. It's quite frustrating sometimes to just find the path forward, but that's also kinda the entire point of the game. If you're playing Pulse, that's the exercise you've signed up for, so while it may be awkward and fiddly, it's hard for me to knock the game *too* badly for just doing what it sets out to do ^^; Aesthetically, the game is very pretty if a bit too simple looking at times. The sound design is quite well done, but, kinda like I expressed in the previous paragraph, the beautiful world can at times get in the way of actually playing the game. It's quite hard to explain how the visuals in Pulse work in only text, but you don't use echolocation. If a sound is happening in the world, that part of the world is visible due to the sound pulses emanated off of those surfaces. This isn't echo location, however, as it's very easy to "see" something through a wall because that wall isn't illuminated with pulses but the thing beyond it is. The Mokos are cute and the concept of "a world through the eyes of a blind girl" is a super neat one, and it makes for a very visually striking and unique little adventure, but if you're sensitive to flashing lights or lots of quick changing colors, this might be one to steer clear of, because it can get *very* disorienting at times in some stages. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Pulse isn't a bad game, but it's a very particularly made one. It does what it sets out to do to an OK degree, but what it's setting out to do is in and of itself going to be something that is only appealing to certain kinds of players, and with very little replay value and such a short play time, this is one that will likely be a difficult to justify purchase for many. If reading this review has made you curious about it, I highly encourage you to check out a video or two on Pulse to get a look at just what it looks like, because it's a super neat concept for a game, and it's not like Pulse fucks it up completely or anything. Pulse is a game made for a very specific kind of person, and while I may not be that person, I think there is still a lot of interest to be found in this title for the right kind of gamer. |
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
|