Not a proper game, per se, but it's the solo adventure I've been spending the past few weeks trying to get through in my free time. If you beat it with all nine classes, you get a special card back for it, and that felt enough to me like beating a game to mark it down here. Dungeon Run is basically a solo arena draft you can do as many times as you want for free! It's a fun little game mode Blizz put in the game for free a little while back, and I'm glad I gave it a shot.
Dungeon Run is basically a rolling draft against 8 semi-randomized AI opponents. You pick one of the nine deck classes and start with a pre-built deck of 10 cards against an opponent picked from a pool of like three starting bosses that you basically can't lose against if you don't just let them win. After that victory, you get to pick one of three randomly given passive cards and then pick from one of three sets of 3 cards set around a certain theme. The passive you pick guides what playable cards you go for, and in addition to the 3 new cards and +5 max HP you get every time you beat a boss, you'll get two special "treasure" cards and another passive item by the time you get to the 8th boss. The six bosses between the starter and final bosses are picked from a much larger pool of like 30 and appear generally anywhere, but there are technically assigned slots (like A.F.Kay will only ever appear as boss #4). These guys are much more possible to lose against, and I've lost against the 3rd or 4th boss more than once because I either got bad draw and/or they got lucky. All the bosses have a unique hero power and deck make-up that make them an interesting challenge to fight, and there are SO many of them that you really can't build a deck to prepare for just one. You need to build a deck that's just gonna be good, not just good against one guy you'll hope you fight. Building an overall good deck is particularly important for the pool of eight final bosses you can face. These guys are absolute bastards, and they have some crazy unfair advantages (sometimes outright "cheating") that you're just gonna need to get lucky to overcome. That said, this IS a tcg, and luck and RNG are just part of the game, so faulting it for needing to be lucky to win is a bit hyperbolic. The difficulty is honestly what makes it so much fun. The passives, themed packs of 3 cards, and treasures are all so great that every run feels different when combined with how the set of bosses you'll be fighting is changing every round. Passives are stuff like, "All your minions that cost 5 or more mana cost 5" or "All of your opponents Minions cost 1 more" or "All your weapons cost 1 mana," the list goes on. The treasures range from game-changing strategy plays to crazy RNG shit like a 0-cost card that randomly reassigns every minion on the board to a certain side of the board, a 3-cost wand that lets you draw 3 cards and makes them cost 0, or a 10-cost wand that randomly keeps casting Pyroblast until a hero dies! There are way more than just 3 themes your packs of 3 cards can be based around as well, so you'll almost never be able to get a whole deck based around just one. This means that games, especially later in the dungeon, can get absolutely crazy with your crazy overpowered crap flying against the AI's and just seeing who comes out on top. Verdict: Highly recommended. If you like CCG's or Hearthstone at all, Dungeon Run is fantastic fun. It combines all the fun and silliness of the Solo Adventures with the strategic drafting of Arena mode all in a unique new way that's totally free and ready to play right past the tutorial. It's the most fun I've had with Hearthstone or CCG's in a long time, and I barely even care that you can't complete dailies by playing it with just how fun it is.
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I am a HUGE sucker for Kirby games (no pun intended), so I was absolutely all over this when it was announced. After being so enammored by the demo a couple weeks back, this became the first game since Wolfenstein The New Order that I've pre-ordered and then played day one. After being a little underwhelmed but satisfied by Triple Deluxe and Planet Robobot, this was a very pleasant upgrade, and definitely my favorite Kirby game in recent memory
Star Allies, at its core, is basically a combination of Return to Dreamland and Triple Deluxe with a smattering of Super Star Ultra's charm on top of it. The gimmick this time around is that you can not only play with four players like in Return to Dreamland, but the other three players are re-skinned enemies, like in Super Star Ultra. The art style is very much Triple Deluxe, and the powers in this game are a greatest hits of basically every Kirby game since Super Star Ultra, with yo-yo, wave, whip, beetle, and even some new ones like web (which are very fun). The controls are also the proto-Smash Bros style that Super Star Ultra had, with blocking, directional attacks, and the like, so every power has an "easy to play, hard to master" feel to it (save for one or two). The game also felt a good length. It's not suuuuper long, but it felt like a more finished experience like Triple Deluxe, where Robobot and Return to Dreamland felt like they ended a bit prematurely by comparison. Gone are many of the more abrupt gimmicks from earlier games. The super powers from Return to Dreamland? Gone. The ultra-inhale seeds from Triple Deluxe? Gone. The robot suit from Robobot? Gone. In their place, are friend-powers, which utilize your number of friends to do a special thing that changes up the flow of that level. You have the friend-wheel (a non-stop forward rolling ball), friend-train (you run forward and can run up walls, like Super Baby Mario in Yoshi's Island), friend-star (basically it's a shmup now), and the friend-bridge (basically you're moving up and down as a platform to allow a friendly enemy to walk past). They're not usually too intrusive, but they're not really as fun as the mech suit from Robobot. The worst sin they commit, tbh, is that they are inherently one-player focused, as EVERYONE can jump during them and move equally, so the best way to do them is to just make everyone else sit and wait until it's over and let the best player among you handle the jumping. This is really a shame, because this game does SO much to make itself an otherwise awesome multiplayer experience for gamers of all skill levels. For starters, the last gimmick in the game, and the best one by far, imo, are the combo powers you can make between your allies. If you hold up on the D-pad/joystick, you can get an ally to imbue your power with theirs. It doesn't work with all powers, but most of them, as each power in the game effectively falls into being either what I refer to as a base, an augment, or an other. A base is something like Sword, where it's a power all in its own and doesn't affect others. An augment would be something like Fire, where not only is it its own power, but if an ally with a base holds 'up', you can imbue their weapon with that element. Some powers like Cleaning (the broom from Adventure 3) even have several elements they can imbue. Additionally, a base with an element can even augment other bases, so you don't need to keep fire if you have a fire sword, for example. An other is stuff like Suplex or Beetle that have a kind of throw move as their up-attack, so they don't get imbued or do imbuing, but have their own tertiary special ability. The design of how the Star Allies even work is also very cleverly done to facilitate easy play among four players. Instead of having to eat a power and then use it up to generate a friend like in Super Star Ultra, this game gives Kirby a throwable friendship heart on his Y-button. This can be thrown at any enemy that could be normally eaten for a power to turn them into a friend. Other player characters also have these hearts, and anyone currently playing can be chosen to become that new befriended character if your roster is full of four characters. This makes getting new powers something easy that every player has agency in, not just Kirby. Something to mention, though, is that only the first player can actually be Kirby, and everyone doesn't get to be one like in Return to Dreamland. However, like in Return to Dreamland, your buddies can get the ability to play as Dedede, Meta Knight, and Waddle Dee, who have some really crazy imbued powers and combos they can pull off (particularly Waddle Dee). The game also really never wants to kick anyone out. The camera always centers on Kirby (it doesn't do any shared nonsense like in Donkey Kong Country Returns 2 or anything), which can occasionally lead to your friends getting a bit lost. This is generally never a problem, however, because your allies never die when they fall down pits, they just get returned to Kirby's current position. Your allies also never die when they get their health dropped to 0, instead falling KO'd on the ground to be brought back to life by a friend who comes over and holds down X for a few seconds (a little like Castle Crashers). You can even share food with kisses just like you could in Super Star Ultra The only way for an ally to actually get permanently toasted is if they get crushed by a crusher wall, although these are so few and far between that it was never really a problem for me. These features mean that, aside from the unfortunate way that most friend-powers are managed, no one ever needs to be waiting for Kirby to find a new enemy to friendify to come back into the game. They never need to get kicked out of the action. The game is also fairly easy, with every player having a quite generous amount of health, so dying happens pretty darn rarely (I died 3 times, and it was always from doing something stupid, not because that bit was hard XP ). Beating Story Mode also unlocks a speed-run mode a bit like how Robobot had it's Meta Knight mode, but this time going through as a group of allies with no Kirby (you pick powers at the start and have them 'til the end), as well as a boss rush mode, so there are some more difficult modes if that is what one is truly looking for in a Kirby game (although difficulty is clearly not this game's main focus). Verdict: Highly Recommended. HAL have really knocked it out of the park with this one. This is one of the best multiplayer Kirby games they've ever made, and second only to Overcooked in my mind as the most brilliant couch co-op game of the decade, and second only to Octodad in terms of just sheer easy-to-access fun factor. It also only needs one Joycon to play, so you can do two-player co-op right out of the box Next up on my Dragon Quest kick was the second game! Popo had warned me that this one had some really god damn mean bits, and damn wasn't he kidding . This game has some really serious design issues, but it really is more up to the growing pains of the genre it was helping pioneer, so I really can't blame the game too much.
I'm just SO glad I was playing the Japanese 3DS remake, because it has the DS remakes' art style but the balancing of the GBC port, so it gets rid of a lot of the miserable grinding of the Famicom original as well as making a lot of the formerly empty or crap loot chests have better loot. I had read the game takes like 20 hours for this version, but it took me only like 14, so right about double what the first game took me, and that's being a little over leveled. (My characters were levels 40, 38, and 33 at the end of the game). The story is an evolution in depth over the original as well as the world building. A LOT more towns and dungeons really make DQ2 feel like a more real world than the comparatively small scope of the first game. Some of the towns are a bit too far apart and/or guarded by monsters whose level curve is a bit harsh, but it's nothing totally game breaking. It certainly makes it apparent when to grind, that's for damn sure This game has some really serious design issues that come about from pioneering new systems while not addressing problems from the original. There are no magic stats, just as in the original. As a result, spells never scale with levels either offensively or defensively. This means that the only way to guard against enemy spells is just raising your HP which will take a crazy level of grinding. And all the grinding in the world won't save you from instant death spells like Sacrifice which I only had happened twice but did a full-party wipe every time it happened. The other big freaking problem is the dungeons, which are just so mean and maze-like. Some of them, particularly near the end of the game, are just so damn full of annoying enemies that put you to sleep or can 1 or 2-shot half the party in just one turn. This is all on TOP of having bullcrap like pitfalls to previous floors, stairways that lead you backwards, and Lost Woods-style puzzles that constantly lead you back to the start of an area. Some of the dungeons could literally take you hours to get through without a guide map, which is why I used them liberally in the second half of the game. That's probably why my game timer was only about 14 hours instead of 20. Verdict: Not Recommended. It's a piece of history, that's to be sure, bit it's also really obvious why this is considered the worst Dragon Quest game. It's got a lot of good ideas, but the execution is just so flawed that it's really difficult to recommend as a game unless you're just hellbent on playing all of the DQ games. There are a ton of far better DQ games out there to play, so just go play those and save yourself the frustration Dragon Quest Heroes is part of the Musou (aka Warriors) series spin-off family of games with things like Hyrule Warriors and Dynasty Warriors Gundam, two games I very much enjoyed. I also quite like me some Dragon Quest, so I thought that this would be a perfect fit for me. While I wasn't exactly wrong, I will preface this review by saying that this is certainly nothing terribly special. If you aren't already a fan of the Musou games, this isn't gonna make you a believer.
On the good side, you have a level of presentation up there with its sister spin-off game of around the same time: Hyrule Warriors. You have an original cast of 4 fighters backed up by a collection of 9 fan favorites(?) from across Dragon Quests 4, 5, 6, and 8:
While most of the selection is very understandable, I put the '?' there because I genuinely had to look up who the guy they had from DQ6 was, and that's a game in the series I've beaten, while I knew immediately who the members from DQ8 were, and that's a game I've played maybe two hours of total. They're beautifully rendered in 3D though, and while the voice acting on them ranges from pretty good to noticeably bad, the English dub is totally serviceable. The sound track is also excellent, with many tracks from older games, although with how much DQ reuses music, that's more or less to be expected. The game also runs fantastically, and I never encountered a single bug otherwise. On the bad side are how the characters actually play compared to something like Hyrule Warriors. Compared to Hyrule Warriors that came out four months prior to this, the move trees are seriously lacking in any kind of depth. Where HW has you constantly unlocking new combos and weapons for each character and their different weapons, every character in DQH has a combo tree that is mostly static the entire game. There are some extra bits and bobs you can get through the level-up skill tree, but it's nothing compared to HW's progression system. While they do try and make up for it with a little equipment system and a little crafting, if you look at the comparatively small, unbalanced character pool along with no option for co-op, and it ends up feeling like a noticeably lesser experience. This is also probably one of the longer Musou games out there. Perhaps it's because I did almost all the side-quests, but those don't really add up to too much outside of the normal gameplay until right before the last chapter (where I spent like 8 hours doing them), as most of them are just collecting a certain amount of ingredients or killing a certain number of monsters. However, most of the "kill X number of monsters" quests ARE given after those monsters have more or less disappeared from your main-story quests, so those do add up to a fair bit of time wasting. On top of that, all of the non-story mission quests take place in the story-mode maps, so it really doesn't feel like anything that different anyways. I racked up a little over 30 hours on this game, but I certainly can't say that I was absolutely enjoying all of it. Even for Dragon Quest, the story is really nothing special. Even just doing story missions, the game is going to take you at least 20 hours to beat (judging from HLTB), and the story is just so trite and predictable that it never grabbed me at all. You may say this is to be expected of a cross-over game, but I quite enjoyed the Hyrule Warriors and Gundam Warriors plots in comparison to this, if for any reason just because they were so much shorter. Omega Force has just not come up with the mission variety to make this series that compelling for so long, and no amount of new spell-casting or equipment systems can hide that. They really should have done something like Dynasty Warriors 8 (which came out 2 years earlier) where certain characters are required for certain missions to freshen up the combat a little bit, because with how few characters there are, combat starts to feel old REALLY fast. Even Hyrule Warriors acknowledged that staleness and drip-fed the new characters to you far better as well as encouraging you to play certain missions as different characters to earn them heart containers. This is all on top of how DQH also has the very modern Omega-Force problem of a really inconsistent difficulty curve. Due to the certain enemy make-up and/or contours of a particular level, it may be vastly harder compared to ones around the same time, and this is especially true for side-quest missions. The other common Omega-Force problem this game has is fucking god-awful menu systems and UI. For all the hand-holding the tutorial does, it NEVER tells you how to level up, which is buried in the "Misc." part of your pause menu as "Allocate Skill Points". I went for like 8 or 10 hours at effectively level 1 just because I figured I hadn't unlocked the ability to level up yet, as I was so sure the game would tell me how given the precedent of instruction it had set so far. Verdict: Not Recommended. As much as it pains me to say, this game just really not worth the price. With a sequel that, from what I hear, is much better (despite not having co-op) also on PS4 for a similar price, the far superior Hyrule Warriors in the same console era across (almost) three systems in counting, not to mention Dynasty Warriors 8 Xtreme Complete Edition which is also on PS4 (and has co-op), there is no shortage of far better Musou games or even Dragon Quest Musou games to occupy your time with. This probably isn't a game you'll hate, but it's probably one you won't end up finishing (even for a Musou game). I was still SUPER in the mood for more Dragon Quest after beating DQB yesterday, so I started looking up ways to play the original legit. I didn't really wanna wait a month for a copy of the Super Famicom remake to come from Japan, so I turned the the Virtual Console. I nearly bought it on the Japanese Wii VC, but it turns out the Japanese 3DS eShop has 3DS remakes of the first three DQ games, so I bought it there instead for just 6 bucks
It's Dragon Quest, but FAR easier than the original. This took me about 6 hours to beat, and even though I got lucky on a few fights, especially the Dragon Lord, I was still able to beat the Dragon Lord at level 19 on my first try. This is a fairly streamlined port that really narrows down the level curve (like every level after 17 or so is just 4k EXP, which is like 12 fights against the monsters in the Dragon Lord's chamber). It also gets rid of the menu system like talking, stairs, open, and replaces it with a mechanical and graphical style far more reminiscent of the DS remakes of DQ's 4-6 where A is just your universal interact button. They also dumb down some things, like the Fairy's Flute, Loto's Armor, and even the hidden staircase behind the Dragon Lord's throne being marked with shiny, unmissable stars, but for what it's worth, the location of Loto's talisman is still hidden (although you still get a big interaction '!' above your head when you walk over it). Verdict: Recommended. It's Dragon Quest like it always was, but way easier and palatable. There is some grinding still, but this is far more beatable in an afternoon/evening than an entire weekend+ affair like the original was. It's pretty to look at and the music is great, so it's a great version to play if you can either read Japanese or just know the game well enough to ignore all the dialogue Bogus has been talking in the Slack chat for a good couple weeks about how much fun he's been having with this game. I've had it for a while, and he finally convinced me to give it a go, and I'm very glad I did! It's certainly an odd gameplay mechanic and genre combo given the series, but just as with Mario X Rabbids Kingdom Battle, just because it looks odd at first doesn't mean it isn't a great game underneath. The game took me about 50 some odd hours to beat, and that was exploring every land and trying to find all the hidden stuff and side objectives in each of the four chapters.
The overall premise is basically the plot and setting of Dragon Quest 1 with the mechanics of Minecraft. A quite strange premise to be sure, but damn if it doesn't work well. Minecraft with a plot really doesn't sound engaging, but it is. The gameplay revolves around building up and guarding a town and doing quests for the villagers inside it. These quests often revolve around either collecting some resource for them or building a very specific building via a blueprint they provide. Gathering resources and building are intimately tied to fighting monsters, who play a dual role of both routinely attacking your town (and sometimes destroying large bits of it, if you aren't careful) and being the guardians/sources of required materials. The building, questing, and combat all support and complement one another, and the exploration that facilitates all of it really gives the game great flow where the player is free to set their own pace. You can spend ages making your town as perfectly defensible and/or beautiful as you want, or you can just do the bare minimum of practicality and get onto more exploration and monster-bashing. The combat is fairly simple, with two types of weapons (hammers with overhead swings and swords with sideways swings) that you can swing ever so fast to do damage to what's in front of you. Weapons have a kind of cadence to their swings, as do monsters to how quickly they can actually take damage, so just mashing the button isn't actually the best way to max out your DPS. The monster damage input only really becomes a problem when you're fighting with your villagers (who will help defend the village and sometimes can be brought out exploring with you as very tough helpers), and the inputs of so many bits of damage can just stop registering when you have three villagers AND you all trying to wail on some bigg'un. The maps, for the most part, are set in a kind of stone, but are slightly randomly generated. There are certain rare item locations that can be randomized as far as which cave they'll be in, but the world always has the same general look to it as far as where certain geographical and NPC monuments are (mountains, castles, etc). The islands themselves are actually quite faithful recreations of the land masses from Dragon Quest 1, with some obvious exceptions on how some continents are broken up into pieces now (which the game does comment on, but chalks it up to some foul magic of the Dragonlord that we couldn't hope to understand ). The story is, in traditional Dragon Quest fashion, is quite tropey in its Western fantasy setting, but very clever in how it tells its story and has great character writing. The characters are colorful, entertaining, and memorable, and this story proves time and again that just because a character talks/acts silly doesn't mean they can't have a meaningful story behind them. The comedy is also well done, and there were more than a few lines that gave me a big chuckle. There are also quite a few jokes and references (particularly in the last chapter) to other Dragon Quest games or popular JRPG tropes that I couldn't help but take screenshots of The only real negative slightly odd controls. The controls are really strange. For a game largely about adding and removing features, the place/use hotbar item button is square, while the attack/remove button is triangle. The X button is how you initiate most misc actions (activating crafting stations, opening doors, talking to people, etc) but also how you open up your game menu. Given how often you need to mash a button to break up blocks or break open heads, having triangle as that button while the far easily mashable X button is the seldom used menu button is an extremely strange design choice to me. Another slight negative is the mission/quest design. Often, you can accomplish several tasks all at once by going to a location. You aren't the fastest runner, so going places can take a little while, and some quest lines ultimately add up to going to the same distant location two to three times consecutively. There's only one or two times in the game this happens that I can remember (out of dozens of quests), but it was still something that I noticed. The game runs fine and controls fine otherwise. You will get some slight FPS drops if there are a good few monsters on screen in an area with rain effects, but they were very seldom for me and I doubt you would ever encounter it on a PS4 Pro. Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you have ever enjoyed Minecraft at all for any length of time, you will likely enjoy this game. I'm sick to death of Minecraft, and I still fell in love with this hard enough to binge through it over the course of like four and a half days. It's a great ARPG and I can't wait for the second one later this year that will add a multiplayer feature <3 |
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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
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