I played through this for this month's TR, as it was one of the only retro SRPGs I own. SRPG is a genre I've enjoyed in the past but am not a massive fan of. Even Fire Emblem is a series I'm not a super huge fan of, despite having beaten half a dozen of them over the years. I have this game on my Super Famicom Mini, and I honestly really didn't expect to finish it. I ended up using save states and rewinds a fair bit, and ended up enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. They were a great way to make the game's difficulty far more appealing to me, and more like the puzzle-ish design of Advance Wars where losing a unit feels a lot less dire (and it also thankfully lowered the time commitment for me significantly). That said, it still took me over 43.5 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game, and that's just the end time on the SFC Mini and ignores all my restarts XP.
Mystery of the Emblem is actually two games jammed into one. The first is a remake of the original Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, but with some new mechanics tossed in (mostly re-balancing leveling, as far as I can tell) that help make it easier and less dependent on RNG like the original was. The other changes to it are to make it fit mechanically alongside the second game on the cart, which is actually FE: Mystery of the Emblem, a direct sequel to Shadow Dragon with much of the same cast. The stories are nothing to write home about, especially in the first game, but it's serviceable in both cases. Mystery of the Emblem is a really jarring thing to go to after Shadow Dragon, given that there is just so little text at all in the first game and SO much more in the second, even if it mostly amounts to larger exposition dumps at the starts and ends of chapters. They're quite sad stories compared to later FE games, with far less happy endings beyond the few most central characters. Even most of the end-game resolution text for characters who live (especially in Shadow Dragon) amount to "they disappeared" or had a not so great life after the war. I did enjoy the story that was there, especially in Mystery of the Emblem, but it's hardly a main selling point of the game or anything. Being that it's SUCH an early entry in the series, and this is also the only pre-GBA Fire Emblem game I've ever played, I expected it to be quite different and my goodness is it. No weapon triangle, no supports of any kind, and the ability to dismount and mount up your mounted units to name some of the biggest differences to later games (a lot of that being innovations introduced in FE4, after all). The mounting/dismounting thing is easily the most annoying mechanic, and mostly seems to be an arbitrary way to hamstring your movement on some levels, and it's something that wouldn't be so annoying if it didn't make mounted units SO much worse (not to mention it's really annoying since you need to swap out their lances for swords whenever you do it). Beyond that there are just lots of weird design decisions or lacking quality of life features, like there being no way to check threat ranges of you or your enemies (which REALLY sucks in a game with so many long-range casters and ballista to worry about) as well as you needing to do all the math yourself for how much damage you're gonna do across menus on two different screens (and the same goes for hit chance, quite often). At least if there IS a threat-range checker (or even a range-stat-checker) feature, I could never find where it was. Most of my resets and rewinds were down to frustrations with "oh, I didn't know how far this could hit me, so I moved forward and now I'm dead." Then other weird things like some characters like Marth and the entire fighter class (that being anyone who uses an axe, of which you get 3 in Shadow Dragon, one of whom was one of my best characters in that game) simply having no promotion items at all. Thankfully for the latter aspect, Mystery of the Emblem remedies this by simply never giving you any axe-users. and the absence of any weapon triangle makes it fairly inconsequential on an overall mechanical level. The map designs and such are good fun, and the music and graphics are excellent and hold up great. I usually end up turning off the battle animations in FE, but I never did in this game. Part of that may have been down to me playing so much of the game streamed to my friends over Discord so I could have the anticipation of getting a hit or a miss, but part of it was also just how pretty and nice the animations are~. There are never any missions that aren't "capture the throne", but there are a lot of neat setups for missions that make them have more interesting aspects around that (like a mission where most of the enemy soldiers don't actually fight you, and if you don't pick them off for easy XP, you get more recruitable characters out of it). There are some problems with the game actually giving you the information on how to recruit many characters, especially in Shadow Dragon (you basically need to guess a TON who is actually related to whom so they could talk to and recruit them), but MotE has a lot less of that. Either way, especially if you don't wanna miss the extra final levels in MotE, playing this game with a simple recruitment/item guide to make sure you don't miss people is something I did and I would also recommend doing to help alleviate any stress over missing recruits. Verdict: Recommended. I think it's age has not been super kind to it, but that's also because of what a definitive game it is. The mechanics and design philosophies laid down in FE3 and then FE4 helped establish the future of the franchise in a big way, and even though it's lacking in a lot of QoL features, these early games still play in a very familiar way as a result. There will likely be some frustrations and resets in both parts of the game, but if you're into SRPGs and want something that isn't too brutally hard, this is yet another game from Nintendo's 16-bit catalog whose main failings come from how well Nintendo and others have innovated on it since.
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As my username might hint at, Hatoful Boyfriend is a game very near and dear to my heart, but believe it or not I'd never beaten it and honestly had barely played it until fairly recently. Up until now it was just a game whose style I really liked, but I'd never really put much time into it until a month or so ago. My girlfriend and I played through it together over Discord over the course of the past month or so, as she voiced the main characters and I gave voiced to all the other characters. A fun bonding activity that lets me indulge in making like I'm a voice actor X3. It took about 20 or so hours to get through all the routes.
Hatoful Boyfriend is a dating sim that began as an April fools joke around a decade ago that the authors were compelled to make into a full game by the incredibly positive feedback to the little snippet of the joke they'd made up until that point. The joke, of course, being that it's a dating sim where you're a human girl who dates birds. Not birds who turn into humans, just straight up talking birds. There are little splash-screens when you first meet them that show them what they might look like if they WERE human, but they're in actuality birds and definitely not humans XD Silly premise aside, Hatoful Boyfriend is actually quite a well written game. The translation can be a bit odd at times (with numerous obvious spelling mistakes, including one character's NAME being misspelled everywhere but his splash screen), but that mostly adds to the quirky fun of it all. And just as it is humorous, it's also fairly adept at being serious when it's trying to be, with particularly the BBL ending having some very good plotting and buildup. Around the silly premise of dating birds is the question of exactly why and how birds and talk, use tools, and go to school, and the tidbits of smaller mysteries surrounding that intermixed with the personal journey of the main character finding love is quite well done. There are 8 characters to romance in the game, with the HD version on Steam on PS4 adding another two endings during summer vacation (which are honestly one of the more weak parts of the game). In addition, once you've gotten an ending with every character in the game, you gain the option at the game's start to "fulfill the promise", which activates the BBL ending (Bad Boy's Love). The BBL ending is much more of a larger mystery primarily concerning the other side characters and not the main character you spend the rest of the game as, and you mostly play as the birds in this much much longer (it's like 6-7 hours long) route. In the original PC release it was more like an adventure game visual novel with choices that could kill you, but those have been streamlined into an un-failable straight VN. While this does remove the frustration of dying, it does make this part feel a bit odd as places where choices or even kind of stricter save system have textual remnants but no mechanical ones. That said, my girlfriend and I both agreed that the BBL route was by far the best part of the game, even if it stumbles at the ending a little. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This was probably an obvious conclusion from the time you began reading this, but this is naturally a game I highly recommend hunting down and giving your time to. It balances serious and silly in a very satisfying way, and the silly premise and writing do a great job at disarming you for the darker and more serious aspects to the story. The translation may be far from perfect, but even the more obvious spelling mistakes and such don't distract enough from the story to keep it from being good at what it's good at. It's something I really enjoyed and think is well worth checking out if you want something a bit silly and even a bit serious ^w^ When I started streaming on Twitch, I never imagined that I'd be going back to any game enough to actually finish it on stream, but lo and behold, I finished Cubivore on stream! This is one of those games I never thought I'd actually ever play because the American version is SO hilariously expensive, but apparently the Japanese version is WAY less sought after and more common, because I picked up my copy for a little less than $10 USD at Book Off. It took me about 6.5 hours to beat the Japanese version with the good ending over the course of 3 streams (so 3 sessions over about a month).
Cubivore is a game with a simple story but a very odd concept. The world of cube-shaped animals is peaceful and animals live with no worries until the day a group of mysterious, colorless animals come and begin eating everything in sight and taking all the color from the world. The world is on the brink of utter destruction until you, the player's animal, are mysteriously born from the sky one day. Outside of that, virtually all of the text in the game comes from the player avatar themself as they narrate from their perspective between stages. All the player avatar really cares about is eating, evolving, and mating, and the fate of the world is only sort of a tangential concern of theirs beyond their own quest for power XD. It's a very silly story that really doesn't take itself seriously at all, and the silly, almost childlike way the main character talks was thoroughly entertaining for me to translate for people watching the stream. The gameplay loop of Cubivore is going through stages eating to get more powerful so you can battle the head animals of each stage to gain their special ability and move to the next stage. As you eat, you assimilate the colors of the cube animals you're eating. There are a variety of colors of animal with different intensities (strengths) and which combo of which colors will give you new evolutions, and you need to have had 100 unique evolutions in order to fight the final boss of the game. Different evolutions and different color types play a bit differently, and some quite differently, as they add little panels of locamotive body parts to your Cube with each evolution. Most are fairly straight-forward as you lock on to attack, charge up, and lunge for the kill, but some prioritize evasion or blocking instead of pursuit and offense, and some even configure the head in different directions (like sideways or even backwards) or use wider turning circles to make you fight very differently. You also collect love points to mate and grow another "limb" (another panel that makes up your body) and be able to get way more powerful forms. Those are all at pre-determined points in the story though, so it's not like you even could choose not to mate if you wanted to (although the scenes for them are pretty funny). The controls, as one would expect of a Nintendo game, play quite well. The only real thing to get used to is the camera, which can take a LOT of getting used to as it very much feels like a game from the mid-90s in that regard. You even need to tap the C-stick one tap at a time to reposition the camera in 60 degree increments, like you're pressing C-buttons on an N64 controller. But outside of that, the game has a lot of cool ideas and other things that make it feel older. The way the game isn't super hard, but also doesn't really hold your hand is cool, but won't be for everyone. There are some evolutions that it will be very hard to get used to, but the game DOES, in a way, give you an idea of how to use them by the animals you eat to become that evolution fighting that way in the first place. It's a neat idea that you have to analyze the way your enemies fight because soon you too will be that enemy and will need to fight like they do. Verdict: Highly Recommended. You'd definitely have to emulate it, as the price tag for the English version is utterly unjustifiable, but I ended up loving Cubivore a lot more than I ever thought I would. It takes a while to get into the swing of how the combat works, but once you do, getting new forms to mess about in is really fun and creates a neat risk-reward of getting new forms but also still being able to fight well enough to get more forms after that. It is absolutely a hidden gem on the Gamecube well worth emulating :) |
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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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