I was struck a month or so ago with a vicious bug to play a bunch of Kirby after a friend was talking about how they were playing the post-launch content in Kirby Star Allies. I thought what better game to start with than Star Allies itself, as I'd never given much time to the content other than the main story to begin with. I spent some 20-odd hours playing through the post-launch Heroes in Another Dimension mode as well as the Guest Star ???? Star Allies Go! mode and the The Ultimate Choice modes. They were so substantial, particularly the Heroes in Another Dimension mode, that I figured I'd do a writeup just for them, if only a short one.
For a quick recap, Kirby Star Allies' big thing is that it's a 4 player Kirby game, not unlike Return to Dreamland on the Wii was, but the thing this time is that instead of a bunch of Kirbys, you can turn the powers you grab into buddies like you could in Kirby Super Star on the SNES. You can even add elemental powers to physical weapons and such for even more combo power, and it's a really fun time. At launch, there were also a few special guest stars who you could play as after you rescued them in the game, King Dedede, MetaKnight, and Waddle Dee. However, after launch, several batches of more guest starts were added based on further Kirby games (from the group of animal companions in Dreamland 2, to Marx from Super Star, to Dark MetaKnight from Amazing Mirror, and so so many more), and all of these 15+ guest stars play super differently to everything else in the game, and have really cool intricacies as to how they play. You can play through the normal game's levels as these guys, which is fun in and of itself, but you can also play the bonus modes with them, and that's why I felt they really shined. First of these modes that's been in the game since launch is the Guest Star ???? mode, which in the original game functioned as basically an hour-ish long speedrun of a bunch of levels from the proper game with most of the bosses as well (including a new boss at the end exclusive to this mode) where you have to play as one of the Star Allies, and Kirby isn't a playable option. This wasn't something I had much patience to play through when the game came out, but it's a lot more fun if you play as the guest stars (which you can do after beating it with a normal enemy once). Each of them has a special intro stage that sorta runs you through their particular unique abilities, and they also have a special stage near the end of the run (and sometimes a few peppered in the middle of their run as well) as well that cater to their particular playstyles. I ended up having so much fun that I played through it as all of them, and while all aren't equally fun, I had a blast doing it. The new characters just play SO differently that it really did feel like a great new challenge every time despite the levels largely being the same. The big thing that shows off these characters best is the Heroes in Another Dimension mode, though. This is a special challenge mode that they added once all the guest stars had been put into the game, and in it you play through a series of challenges as each and every one of the guest stars. This is a lot of puzzle platforming as well as some new extra hard boss fights, and they're put together really well! There are 120 hearts to collect along the way hidden behind a bunch of puzzles and reflex tests that you'll do with the guest stars' unique abilities, and if you manage to get 100 of them, you'll get a special boss at the end and unlock the hidden final guest star! It's all around a pretty darn tough mode, especially those boss fights, but it's a really good time, and well worth checking out if you enjoyed your time through Star Allies the first time. The last thing I played was The Ultimate Choice, which is this game's Arena mode. It has several levels of difficulty, and you don't get the percentage bonus for completing it until you've done it at the highest level of 8 (Soul Melter difficulty). This is a pretty damn hard mode to do, even with the ability to pick exactly who you have in your 4-person team from the very powerful guest stars (I found Marx to be the best and safest pick, generally), but I actually managed it! I never thought I'd be able to get this mode done and get my save file to 100% completion, so I was pretty proud of myself for finally doing it~. Upon beating it, you even get told a secret code to unlock a super SUPER hard Soul Melter EX difficulty mode, and it's the same difficulty code that unlocks the harder mode in the original Kirby's Dreamland, which I thought was super cute ^w^ (I didn't try that mode though. Normal Soul Melter was hard enough for me XP). Verdict: Highly Recommended. Giving a recommendation for what's basically free content is a little weird, but it's well worth going back and trying if you enjoyed Star Allies back around when it came out and are feeling the pull to go back and try some more Kirby fun. The normal modes in the base game were already good, but the guest stars add a lot more fun into them, and Heroes in Another Dimension is another really nice addition to an already pretty big package. It all adds up to be a pretty darn impressive free bunch of stuff added to the game, and if you like Kirby, Star Allies is more worth picking up than ever before in my opinion~.
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Better known in the West as simply Soul Hackers when it was finally localized via its 3DS port, this is the sequel to the other SMT Saturn game, Devil Summoner. It was the next stop in my SMT series chronological playthrough after Persona 1, and I finally got around to playing it. I'd heard a lot about it, and conflicting things, namely that it was both far harder than Devil Summoner 1 and also that it was way easier, and I honestly can see where both of these opinions come from, but I'll get to that later XD. It took me around 45 hours to get to the end of the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
Soul Hackers is, as the name suggests, a story about a group of hackers. You play a member of SPOOKIES, a hacker group living out of a supped up trailer truck in the new high-tech Japanese city of Amami. A true city of tomorrow, it contains the HQ of the tech giant Algon Soft, who have just launched their new VR world: Paradigm X. You hack into this world to get access to the very exclusive launch, and very quickly find yourself embroiled in a larger plot involving demons, devil summoning, and a quirky and playful demon named Nemisa who takes residence in your friend Hitomi's body. I both like Soul Hackers' story more and less than Devil Summoner 1's story. On the positive side, I really like how there isn't some big bad demon behind everything at the end, pulling the strings of mortals to fulfill its wishes. In a much more straightforward and easily analogous to reality way, human greed for more capital and power (in this case coming from the tech sector) is what's plunged the world into peril via their misuse of demons. On the other side, you have the new cast of characters of the SPOOKIES. They're both a plus and a minus, as while they're a really fun cast of characters that add a lot to the character of the game and to the city, they're also not really given enough attention to really meaningfully add to the game outside of what they do for plot stuff. There's a few attempts here and there, but they come off as jarring more than anything else with how much they clash with the more somewhat wacky 'monster of the week' episodic nature of the dungeons you're going into and characters you're meeting (not unlike the more casual ghost-busting formula of Devil Summoner 1). It's something that isn't so much done badly so much as it left me wanting for more, so while Soul Hackers more or less has a better story on paper (particularly with its themes and how they're executed), I still prefer Devil Summoner 1's narrative. The gameplay of Soul Hackers is the at this point very familiar routine of dungeon crawling while recruiting demons through bargaining and conversation all the way (and fusing them to get new stronger demons), but it's the final time a lot of its mechanics are actually done in one of (what I would consider) the mainline SMT and SMT-adjacent games. This is the last one to do first-person dungeon crawling, this is the last one to have magnetite as a mechanic, and this is the last one to use a demon loyalty system. Thankfully, they manage to end it all on a real high note, and it's one of the best executions of these mechanics yet. The dungeons are very well paced and have their difficulty balanced quite well (for the most part). They have very very little mean design and are generally very approachable and forgiving. They have healing spots and save points in more numerous locations than previous games, and the auto-map you can access even shows them on the map as well as traps you encounter, so you have far less cause to use the markers you can place on it (although the option is certainly nice). The improvements to the demon loyalty system are well worth elaborating on, though. In the two Devil Summoner games, demons don't just join you: they have personalities. Different demon personalities will like to do different things (not be told what to do at all, prefer to heal, prefer to use physical attacks, prefer to use magic attacks, etc). In the first game, they had these personalities and it would dictate how they would fight if you let them pick their own moves, but to get them to listen to you and go against their natures, you'd need to ply them with gifts and alcohol, and it'd never go up any other way. In Soul Hackers, instructing your demons in battle actually makes their affinity for you go up, so getting loyal demons is WAY easier now. It makes the demon personality system actually a lot more fun to engage with, as even demons with inconvenient personalities can have those personalities changed to something else temporarily. I'm still not sure it's actually a *good* addition to the SMT formula, but this executes on it WAY better than the previous game did, and even if it isn't outright good, it's at least fun this time. The last positive mechanical thing I wanna mention is the way your GunCom (your gun-shaped portable computer) works. It's what you use in the Devil Summoner games instead of the arm-mounted Power Glove-like computer of previous SMT games to summon and interact with demons. But in this game, you can install software onto it (apps in the 3DS version) and this software allows you to get certain abilities when you're out in about. These abilities can range from giving you a mini-map to preventing back attacks to giving you better/more likely item drops to even being able to save anywhere. The apps are a really cool and good idea with giving the player more choices on what kind of run they wanna do. Do you wanna err on the side of caution and use 2 of your 5 app slots on being able to save anywhere, or would you rather have no back attacks and the ability to recruit dark-type demons in those slots instead? It's a great addition to the game's formula, and I'm almost a little sad it never got the chance to come back (because they both stopped using this style and the new Soul Hackers coming out is pretty clearly just gonna be another Persona game). On the more negative side of things, the game's balance is good and the information provided you is too, but not always. Bosses in particular can be really brutal roadblocks at times, and a lot of that has to do with the spell set you give Nemisa. Now unlike the first Devil Summoner game, where they made it very explicit when you were deciding your female partner's spell list and what you were giving her, in this game there is strangely 0 indication that you're doing that. This wouldn't be *quite* so much a problem if her electric skillset weren't SO much better than the ice or fire ones, as TONS of bosses are strong against or outright absorb ice and/or fire while comparatively very few do that for electricity. Your demons are useful, sure, but Nemisa is one of the most hilariously powerful human companions ever in an SMT game, and she's where the bulk of your damage output will come from, so making it so easy to screw yourself into a MUCH harder time is something I have a hard time forgiving the game for given how the first game very deliberately avoided doing that. It's not a huge gripe, but it's something to be aware of for sure. The presentation is once again excellent. Tons of demon sprites have been reused from Devil Summoner 1, but a lot of them have been changed or upgraded too, and I was pretty surprised at just how many new or altered demons there were. Character designs are very pretty, and the environments and battle animations have also gotten a big graphical upgrade as well. This all comes at the cost of some longer load times, unfortunately, but I didn't find them too painfully long myself. The music is also once again excellent, having a more upbeat and funky OST than earlier SMT games, and it's a soundtrack I dig a lot~. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Out of all of the old SMT games I've played, this is easily the one I recommend the most. It's got a good story, fun characters, good balancing, and good dungeons, and it's even available on (mostly) modern hardware via the very good 3DS port! If you were gonna give any older-style SMT game a try, this is definitely the one I'd recommend first and foremost with just how approachable and forgiving it is. |
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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
April 2024
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