This is a game Prfsnl recommended to me a couple weeks back, and it also happened to be cheap enough in the eShop at the time that I had enough existing funds to just buy it outright without needing to go buy a cash card or anything. A fair few other friends also recommended it, so I moved it up my priority list a fair bit, because I'm nothing if not a sucker for a good Metroidvania. I really needed SOMETHING to take the edge off from my attempts at trying to beat the last level of Drakengard 3, and this was the first thing that came to mind, so I beat the English version of the game over around 5 or so hours over two sittings (before and after my last attempts at Drakengard XP).
Alwa's Awakening is a game made to be reminiscent of old, 8-bit Metroid-style game (to the point they've even gone as far as to actually port the game to the NES), and it has a story to match. The land was peaceful until a big bad guy came to heck it up, he's been hecking things up along with his four big bad guy friends for quite some time now, and the heroine Zoe (you) have been summoned in a last-ditch effort to save the land. It's a very text-light story for a game released only a couple years ago, but it fits very well with the style they're going for, so I don't really begrudge the game for that. It certainly made the narrative of the game far more boring for me because it's just a total non-entity, but the lack of narrative itself isn't inherently a negative aspect of the game. The game itself is a fairly simple Metroidvania with four dungeons before a final dungeon and boss. You go around the world in a very familiar side-scrolling way, and your main method of attack is your staff that you swing at enemies. You can eventually unlock gems to equip into the staff (which can be cycled through with a shoulder button and used via Up + Attack), and they're your movement abilities throughout the game, giving you abilities such as summoning blocks or bubble to push or climb on. The game overall has a very "fine" quality to it. Combat is a bit unforgiving, given that you only have 3 hits (6 if you make the long trek back to a healing fountain to fill up your bottle) between you and death, healing drops are rare, and there are many bottomless pits. However, the enemies and bosses themselves generally have quite simple patterns (or a pretty easy cheese strat), and the game is generally fairly good about checkpoints. The bosses aren't anything terribly special, and just about all of them fall into the camp of either "too hard" or "too easy", especially once you figure out their one trick, but this game is overall very simple in that regard. The bigger bugbear in the room is the platforming, which especially in final areas gets way too merciless for its own good. Even the save rooms in the final dungeon have death traps in them, so even if you make it there you aren't guaranteed to actually live to touch that save point. The game has a weird juxtaposition of pretty easy combat alongside some pretty merciless instant-death-packed platforming for most of its runtime, and it makes the pacing pretty rough as a result. It peppers an already fairly lukewarm experience with dashes of being needlessly frustrating, and despite the main character's quite slow movement and reliable jumping, I really didn't care for a lot of the platforming elements in the game. The presentation is also very adequate. It makes a lot of sense that the company that developed this game also published Cathedral, since that's another pretty rough Metroidvania with just a bit too much difficulty and a very unmemorable art style. The art is colorful and nice for what it is, but it's aiming mostly for homage, and that means it comes off as feeling generic by design. It isn't poorly done, and it actually all looks quite nice, but it's also most certainly generic and unmemorable. The music is all fine, but I wouldn't call any of it particularly special. It's pretty good on a technical level, but the hitbox on your staff can be quite temperamental at times, especially if you're not standing on an unmoving floor. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Perhaps I went in with my expectations too high based on what other people told me about this game, or perhaps I'm just spoiled for Metroidvanias, but I really didn't enjoy my time with this game terribly much. It isn't a badly made game and it's more than adequately put together for the low price it goes for, but it's just so rough around the edges and overall unmemorable that I have a pretty hard time recommending it. You likely won't dislike your time with this game, and you might even enjoy it quite a bit, but as far as indie Metroidvanias on the Switch go, it is not hard to find a similarly priced and far better game to put your time and money into instead.
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I've become quite the Yoko Taro fan over the past year or so, even more so than I already was after beating Nier so many years ago. Drakengard 3 was the last of his console games I had not yet beaten, and given that my significant other also wanted to start up this game recently, I had the perfect opportunity to both play through it and also compare notes with her~. I didn't end up getting all four endings (for reasons I'll elaborate on later), but I got three of them! It took me about 35+ hours to beat all but the very last stage on the Japanese version of the game.
You play the role of Zero, an very powerful fighter on a mission to kill the five Intoners who brought peace to the world with their appearance some decades ago. Or did they? During the opening, almost Zelda-like introduction to the game's world, the scroll you're being read from is stopped by a blood-stained sword piercing the heart of the narrator, also known as Zero's first (on-screen) kill. The other Intoners are named One, Two, Three, Four, and Five, and Zero is their older sister. They call her a betrayer, and she's clearly a bad person, but the Intoners themselves don't seem exactly like good guys either. Drakengard 3 is a story that begins with an unreliable narrator and takes quite a few twists and turns in how it leads you through the game's several endings. Though it's *called* Drakengard 3, this is both technically a prequel but also an ultimately totally self-contained story. It's also a Yoko Taro game, so of course it has multiple endings, and it also plays with the multiple endings in a variety of ways similar to other Yoko Taro games, but most similarly (I'd say) to Drakengard 1. Unlike Nier (the original), there isn't really much replaying of content, and it's more like there are branching paths the story can take, and you'll see those branches effectively displayed as extra chapters once you beat the game's main 6 chapters (with branches B, C, and D effectively being chapters 7, 8, and 9). They do reuse old maps, but you go through them in different ways and the enemies in them are different and much tougher, and they also include new bosses to fight as well. The writing itself is the foremost reason to show up to just about any Yoko Taro game (I'd argue), and this game doesn't disappoint. Zero and her growing band of weird, sex-obsessed followers are quite the motley crew as far as RPG protagonists go. They start off seeming like a simply cynical world-ending anti-hero brigade, but as the other branches go on, you'll see other sides of them as well as more sides of Zero's story that cast the adventure thus far in much different lights. This game, like Drakengard 1, also ends with a rhythm game that's unlike anything in the game thus far, and it's also VERY difficult (far more difficult than D1's was), to the point it was simply too much for me to beat it, but looking at the ending online, I do appreciate its presence in the narrative. Where D1 uses its final rhythm nightmare game as the final mountain you the player must climb in your quest for completion and destruction, D3's final mission is meant to portray the suffering of the character doing it. It's a metaphor for the incredibly difficult task they have to go through to actually end the adventure and make all the sacrifice thus far worth it, and I respect its use in that way, even if it is Yoko Taro going back to a familiar favorite. Drakengard 3's story is ultimately a hopeful and positive one, and although its weird cast of characters did grow on me over time, this is probably my least favorite-written game he's made. That's not to say it's poorly written, because it's not. It's just that the themes at play get a bit too lost in all of the lore and witty dialogue, and I think Nier, Automata, and Drakengard 1 do a bit of a better job of staying on track in a way intelligible to the player. Though you aren't replaying that much content, the replaying or re-viewing of certain scenes (whether the same or altered) in both Nier games gives the player a lot more time to take in the deeper metaphor behind those scenes, and I think Drakengard 3 isn't actually helped all that much by not making the player re-view many story beats. This game is definitely a stepping stone between what Nier was and what Nier Automata would be, but it doesn't quite stick the landing quite as well as its more complex successor or its comparatively more simple predecessors. Gameplay-wise, Drakengard 3 is also very clearly a stepping stone between Yoko Taro's past and present. While there ARE dragon-riding segments, the old all-range-mode stuff that fills Drakengard 1's (and Drakengard 2's) chapters are completely absent, and instead you have only a couple rail-shooter levels on the dragon's back (which are quite well done) and a few more levels than that where you're fighting on the ground but on the dragon. Even those are well executed though, as they're a great blend of flashy action and simple yet difficult combat. The normal levels play a little bit like a Musou game in how you have special chests full of upgrade cards, money, and new weapons to find (as well as new weapons and consumables to buy between levels), but the enemy counts are nowhere near high enough to compare to Musou games or the earlier Drakengard games. The weapon combo structures and UI are certainly Musou-like in their presentation, but the actual level and enemy designs make this feel much more like a traditional stage-based 3D character action game than a Musou. You have four weapon types that you get throughout the game, swords, spears, melee gauntlets, and chakrams (of which I favored swords) which have a variety of archetypes among each type as well as varying strengths, and you also have a pretty good pool of normal enemies to fight, many of whom will not let you pass so easily. It's certainly not the hardest 3D action game I've played (God Hand this most certainly ain't), but this will likely give you a fair bit more trouble to beat than the original Nier did. The presentation is as stellar as you'd expect a post-Nier Yoko Taro game to be, but also definitely shows the trouble of its development cycle. The graphics look very nice, the voice acting is good, and the music is absolutely excellent, but the devil lies in the details, and in this case its the hardware. This game just isn't very well optimized for PS3, and while it is far from unplayable (I never found that it impacted my ability to play the game any time outside of one weird visual glitch that was fixed with a software reset), this game has a consistently troubled framerate that will likely bother those sensitive to such things. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Unlike something like the original Drakengard, which shows its age a bit too much and hides its deeper themes a bit too deeply to be easily recommended, Drakengard 3 (like both Nier games) is a genuinely fun game to play that isn't hard at all to recommend. Top that off with how good the writing is and you've got a really excellent game on the PS3. While the writing may not be my favorite, it did have me very engaged and giggling quite a bit as I went through, so it's clearly doing quite a bit right. If you're a fan of Yoko Taro's work at all, or just games with unconventionally presented stories, this is absolutely a game you should not miss if you think you can stomach the price tag and the framerate issues~. The 7th game in the Atelier series I've beaten and the sequel to one of my favorites in the series, I had high hopes for playing through Atelier Totori (the 12th game in the series). I've been co-streaming Atelier games (watching as she plays the actual game) with a friend for over a year now, and this is the first one I've played myself that she more or less had also entirely played. While I did watch her play through most of Atelier Rorona Plus, that's quite a different animal from the original version. Atelier Totori is nearly identical to its later remasters though, with only a dungeon here or there and another playable character or two differentiating them. However, even despite having seen more or less the entire game before (I'd never seen the proper ending), this one still managed to captivate me all throughout playing it. It took me about 45 hours to get through the Japanese version of the game doing Rorona's ending, Melvia's ending, and (my favorite) Mimi's ending.
Atelier Totori picks up a few years after the ending of Atelier Rorona. Rorona has begun traveling the world researching alchemy as well as trying to teach potential students alchemy too. However, her attempts to teach are met with failure after failure save for one girl in the small seaside village of Alanya, which is where our titular alchemist comes into the picture. Dreaming of finding her long lost mother, Totori uses her newfound (albeit fledgling) alchemy prowess to set out for the capital of the (as of quite recently) Republic of Arland to become an adventurer just like she was. Her journey will have her meeting many new faces, some returning characters from Atelier Rorona but many all new characters to Totori's story as well. The story is far and away my favorite part of Atelier Totori. People who've been reading my reviews for a while likely know that character writing is absolutely what I live for, and this game (as Atelier games often do (or at least did -_-)) has it in spades, but not quite like Atelier Rorona had. While Atelier Rorona had a more quiet, less directed story as you guided Rorona through adolescence, Totori's story is less conventional and has a more concrete beginning, middle and end, at least as far as Atelier games with time limits are concerned. It's a story very concerned with not only the general theme of the Arland series, the relationships between students and teachers, but also with a very present and strong new motif of loss, grief, and acceptance, and the powerful transforming effect they can have on people. The way Totori, her big sister, and her father get along in their day to day lives hit really hard for me. I don't think any game has made me cry as much as this one has ^^;. That's not to say it will definitely hit that hard for you, but this is a game whose emotional through-lines are laid well and thoroughly in a way that is stand-out excellence even in a series that's no stranger to good dialogue writing. While the story is in the territory of "not just different but better too" than Atelier Rorona's was, I would say the gameplay is almost universally better. While Atelier Rorona was in many ways a re-imagining of the first Atelier game, following a girl and her workshop all centered around one town, Atelier Totori is something of a re-imagining of the second game in the series, as the ground Totori covers is a LOT larger than Rorona ever did in her game, and you even have two towns and two Ateliers to go between (somewhat like you did in the 2nd Atelier game). Items still have persistent and unique features respective to themselves, the maps you explore to collect them in have changed a lot. Gone is Rorona's "few areas with many maps" approach and here to stay is exploring nodes around a much larger world map which are each a (usually) quite small area to fight enemies and collect ingredients in. Traveling between these nodes takes time, very similarly to how it did in Atelier Rorona, but there are much greater changes in how time management has been drastically altered in this game. Where before, once you got to an area, time effectively stood still as you fought whatever monsters and collected whatever materials were in that area, now EVERYTHING you do takes time, be it fighting monsters or gathering ingredients. This makes time management a much larger part of the experience, as the overall time crunch, even for the normal ending, is much harsher than it was in that game. That greater difficulty in time management is increased also by the fact that you have two parallel sorts of progression tracking, with one being the greater quest to find your mother, and the other being rising through the ranks of the adventurer's guild. The guild ranks are handled in a really fun and intuitive way, as you receive points like they were mini-achievements for doing anything from killing an optional boss to just crafting a bunch or completing a bunch of requests (which are also in this game, in their very familiar forms of either killing monsters or delivering items). The tightly defined 90-day story quests of Rorona that make that game such a less stressful time management experience are totally gone. However, this is one of the few Atelier games with a time limit that actually has not just combat checks, but a genuine final boss, and letting time get away from you to the point where he's WAY to strong for you to kill is something all too easy to do (and is why I'd never seen anything but the bad ending before playing through this myself, and my friend's misfortune is why I was wary enough to use my time as wisely as I could during my own playthrough). Atelier Totori is one of the first games in the series to both have a time limit and also realize just how broken a build you could make, and the bosses (especially the optional ones) really push to the limit just how tough you can get. No longer does the old strategy of simply grinding up levels or making a pile of really really big bombs do the trick anymore, as even normal late game enemies will require you to have a good stockpile of both defensive and offensive weapons to deal with them. Honestly, one of my only genuine complaints with Totori as a game (other than the writing having a little too much fan service for my liking, at least compared to Atelier Rorona) is that between the difficult enemies and bosses and the removal or nerfing of items that used to be very good (there are almost no full-party healing items in this game, for example), this game is just a bit too hard for its own good for what a game like Atelier Rorona or the earlier games like it in the series would've led you to expect. However, just because the obstacles are built up higher doesn't mean you don't get anything new in your corner either. Sure, you have some smaller things like the removal of Rorona's "HP is everything, even mana" system in favor of a more traditional HP, MP, and LP (consumed when traveling) system, and you also can recruit Rorona herself into your party to give you not one but two item-using party members in your team of three. The battle systems have also FINALLY been given a visible turn order counter in the lower corner. Now certain moves taking longer to do than other moves and making your next turn therefore take longer is something the Atelier games have always had but have kept secret. It was something playing most any of the old ones you'd probably guess at the existence of just by virtue of experimenting with the combat even a little. But this game finally makes it visible and usable to your advantage by planning how you'll do each characters move, and it's thankfully a feature that sticks around. But while turn orders and HP systems are fine and all, the most important new addition is just knee high: Chims! In Rorona you had Hom the homunculus who was basically just another pair of hands to craft with, but they weren't especially convenient or easy to use in the original game. Chims, that's right, PLURAL, are chibi-homunculi who you can use in much more diverse ways. Unlike Hom, you can get more than one Chim by progressing through the story and doing optional quests, getting a minimum of two and a maximum of five. Also better than Hom is that not only can Chims collect specific ingredients when asked (where Hom just brought back a random smattering from wherever you sent them), a Chim doesn't even need materials to craft things! Sure, compared to yourself, it takes a while for them to craft much scarier items like big bombs or healing items, but not needing to get the resources to make that stuff is such a lifesaver. The only sticking point is that Chims, unlike Hom, need fuel to function: pie! If you don't want your Chim to get tired and laze about all day, you need to keep them supplied with a good supply of plain pie items. However, that's also just work you can conveniently delogate to other Chims, if you're so inclined. On a mechanical level, Chims and their function are my favorite new addition to the overall way these games play, and adjusting the military Chim-dustrial complex to suit your battling or crafting needs is a constant part of the larger crafting systems in this game. The crafting and synthesis itself isn't thaaat different in this game compared to Atelier Rorona, but it is present in all its glory. You still have unique traits to each item, as mentioned before, but you also have a lot more qualities items can have. This is another little beef I have with how the game is designed, as a lot of these traits don't really have super intuitive effects, although you can thankfully see what the effect is on screen just about any time that effect would matter. Aside from that, using different qualities or varieties of ingredient to make your end result even better is just as much fun here as it was in Rorona, for the most part. The nicest overall addition here is the revamping of the UI to make crafting less of a menu headache, really. The presentation of this game is as top notch as Rorona was and then some, even for an Atelier game. The 3D models have been touched up a lot, and while they still look a little chibi, they don't look anywhere near as different to the character portraits as the ones in the original Atelier Rorona did. Those 2D character portraits that do the job of most of the acting during the visual novel-like dialogue scenes are still here and as beautiful as ever, with each character having a large assortment of different expressions they can use. The music is also as excellent as ever, with Gust again not disappointing between the new renditions (or just outright unaltered inclusions) of old tracks as well as the oodles of great new songs in this game. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is easily one of my favorite games I've played all year. Atelier Rorona (not to mention a lot of the other great games) set a damn high bar, and Atelier Totori soared over it for me. This is definitely not a great first Atelier game for someone, as it's just too difficult with how it uses its time management and boss battles compared to Rorona, but this is a stellar sequel to the original Atelier Rorona and builds so well on the piles that game already did right. This is definitely my new favorite in the series, and one I cannot recommend enough paired alongside its predecessor (or even just played on its own, if you're feeling brave enough). Perhaps one of the most evident signs of just how much I love this game is just how highly I considered doing another playthrough immediately after my first one to try and get the true ending (which is pretty damn tough to do). I almost never play RPGs twice, let alone back-to-back, and if I didn't have other more pressing things on my gaming horizon, I would've dove right back in. Also known as Kaisoku Tenshi (or as the English on the Japanese box art says, "High Tension Comical Action Game The Rapid Angel"), this is a game I learned about via a video that someone on the Slack chat shared with me about cool, rare games on Japanese PSN to look at before the service was (going to be) shut down. It looked neat, so I picked it up, and this month's TR theme of playing very expensive games made it the perfect thing to try out. I really didn't know what to expect from this game other than something a bit silly, but I was absolutely delighted with what I ended up finding. It took me a little under 2 hours to beat the game playing as Ayane on my PS3.
The game's story is ultimately pretty simple. You play as one of three girls working for the Rapid Angel delivery company. You aren't a very popular delivery company, but when you get a very important delivery, it's up to you to see it to its destination! It turns out this is a VERY important delivery, as you'll be fighting no shortage of bandits, evil animals, super powered assassins, and demons before the package reaches its safe(?) destination! The game has a SUPER 90's animation style, and it not only has a (weirdly *very* compressed) animated opening video, but also full VA of the characters speaking to give the story through stills and VN-style asides in between levels. Each playable character even has her own version of the story, giving it a good deal of replay value outside of going for higher scores and such. It's super charming and silly and I was really taken just how wacky it is. It won't be everyone's style of humor, but it was something I found very entertaining~. The gameplay is a side-scrolling action platformer with a few branching paths thrown in. There are plenty of bosses, both mid-level and end-level, to fight, but the important thing here is your time limit! It's not the strictest time limit in the world, but it plays into the whole aspect of making your delivery on time. While the combat is fine, your range is short, so it's often the smarter choice to prioritize your health and your clock, because you have a delivery to make! The game does have infinite continues, and you do have a pretty big health bar, but you also only have one life. This gives the game a good level of challenge without feeling too unforgiving, and even though I felt satisfied beating it using a few continues, it's something I think I could beat in one continue if given a few more playthroughs. The presentation is excellent. As previously mentioned, the very 90's style fits the tone of the game fantastically. Characters have tons of really silly and exaggerated facial expressions they'll pull to match how extra their VA work is, and it all fits together great. The soundtrack is also quite solid, though not super duper memorable compared to the graphical presentation. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a bit of a harder game to recommend if you can't understand Japanese, but I definitely got my 600 yen's worth with this one. It's even on international PSN as well as Japanese PSN, so you don't even need to make a foreign account to pick this one up the same way I did~. If you're into platformers and love a weird, silly style, this is absolutely a game you can't afford to miss out on. This is a game I just remembered existed and thought would make for a good stream. I watched a Let's Play of it aaaages ago, but I barely remembered any of it, and anyone I mentioned my consideration to stream this game to was really excited to see me play it. Thankfully, it's very easily acquired for the low low price of 100 yen around here, so it was pretty easy to acquire~. I beat it over the course of a little under two hours in one Twitch stream playing the game on the original hardware.
The Bouncer was toted as a sort of playable movie, and that's more or less how the story plays out. However, the story is something more akin to a cheaply produced action movie than some larger summer blockbuster. The titular bouncers of from a bar called Fate on Dog Street, and a girl they know named Dominique gets kidnapped by mysterious assassins who invade the bar one day. It ends up turning into a quest to save the girl and the world from the evil corporation, and it involves so many unimportant characters and weird twists of logic that it's certainly entertaining, albeit not exactly a great story XP. There are three playable characters, and depending on whom you play and when, the levels/scenes you play can change, but it doesn't exactly do anything to make the story more interesting. It more so just adds some replayability. The English script has been punched up a bit, but it's only really to the purpose of leaning into the campy, one-liner focused humor that the Japanese already has a fair amount of. The sillier English script definitely makes it more entertaining, but it's definitely not something I'd call a "must watch" by any means. You'd also be much better off watching this game than playing it, because it plays BAD. This is a 3D brawler and Square's first game on the PS2, and it very much continues Square's trend of the PS1 era of more style than substance. The substance here is a very rough 3D brawler with RPG elements, and it can't even get that latter part right. For starters, there is no way to control the camera or manually target enemies, so you're at the mercy of the arbitrary and bad auto-targeting system to try and attack enemies. Attacking enemies feels terrible because different attacks are mapped to different elements of the PS2's infamous pressure-sensitive buttons gimmick, where a light tap on O will give a different move than a firm press will. In practice, this makes fighting chaotic and confusing because it's actually REALLY hard to differentiate between what will be a firm press or a quick tap when you're in the heat of fighting bad guys. To add one last insult to injury, your fellow bouncers are often fighting alongside you, and while you'll get EXP if you get the last hit on an enemy, you get 0 EXP if one of your allies steals that last hit from you. It makes for a frustrating and not very fun fighting experience, and the only benefits it has are that the game isn't very long and it's also not terribly difficult. The presentation is notable in that the characters were designed by Tetsuya Nomura (of Kingdom Hearts fame), but other than that it's nothing that special. None of the music is particularly memorable, and the character designs were mostly entertaining on the grounds that they look like a bunch of Kingdom Hearts rejects (which isn't the game's fault, as it came out significantly earlier than that did, but it is most certainly the fact of the matter in 2021 ^^;). Verdict: Not Recommended. There's a weird multiplayer mode you can do as well if you feel like doing some Ehrgeiz (made by these same devs)-style bad 3D fighting with friends, but there really isn't anything this game offers that's worth putting your time or money into it. It's a much more entertaining game to watch the madness of than play yourself, and I would've felt pretty cheated paying much more than I did for it XP. It's memorable for being weird, sure, but that's damning with faint praise given how little else there is to praise in The Bouncer. This is the last of the mainline Zelda games I've never beaten. I was putting it off for years, and I honestly thought I'd just never get around to it, but I've been playing and enjoying so many similar games lately (like Wai Wai World or Getsu Fuuma Den) that I figured it was about time I finally sat down and gave a go to beat this white whale of a Zelda game. I even decided to make it extra difficult for myself and did it on my Famicom Mini, and I also streamed it on Twitch. I beat it on my Famicom Mini over the course of three weeks (three streams) over about 10 total hours.
Zelda 2 is an immediate sequel to the original Zelda, where Link learns that there isn't just that original Zelda to save, but an ORIGINAL Zelda to save as well, who's been sleeping for a very VERY long time. What's worse, if he doesn't go through the quest to retrieve the triforce to wake her, Ganon's minions are working to revive him! Link once again dons his trusty green tunic and sword to go out and stop Ganon's minions and get that triforce! Being a Famicom action/adventure game, the story is very light and generally just does mechanical legwork rather than telling any kind of larger or more meaningful story, but it does what it needs to and sets up the stakes and everything nicely enough. The gameplay is among that slew of 1987 and 1988 side-scrolling 2D action/adventure games on the Famicom, as Link goes around towns collecting spells and new moves as well as dungeons to collect new traversal items (which are really more like keys to access new areas, really) and fight bosses among the land's 6 temples. It's notoriously very different from the original Legend of Zelda, as where that was an overhead-perspective action/adventure game, the only overhead parts here are navigating the world map. The action and adventuring itself is pretty familiar among other games in the genre, but it's definitely more technical than many others I've played. Sure, Link has spells and a mana bar instead of his extra items like he got in Zelda 1, but the bigger difference here is how he fights. You have two tiers of height that you can hold your shield at, either high or low, and blocking enemy projectiles and sword swings is a big part of the combat with normal enemies. Killing enemies also gets you experience points which you can use to upgrade your magic (making certain spells cost lower mana amounts), your health (which effectively raises your defense), or your sword (which just makes you do more damage). This game also has quite the reputation for being a pretty darn hard game, even for a Zelda game, and I'd say it deserves that pretty well. Sure, you can find new heart containers to extend your health bar, and get level ups by killing enough enemies to increase your defense, but even then there are bottomless pits and you only have three lives. Lose all three and it's back to Zelda's palace (unless you're in the final dungeon). The combat is overall quite good and the game controls well, and I wouldn't really call it faulted at all in that regard. It's really just difficult and technically demanding in a way very few other Zelda games are, and, though my feelings towards this have weakened a bit now, I still maintain my position that Zelda 2 is at times difficult to a fault in just how punishing it often is. The signposting in the game is generally really good. There are a few places and things that I needed to look up (and one thing I remembered from watching Key play this game months back), but overall there's very very little that isn't very clearly told to you by SOMEONE, at least in the Japanese translation. I do question the decision to make all of the dialogue in katakana in this version, as it makes villagers much harder to understand than if they were given more conventional speaking styles, but the things they tell you are by and large very good hints and information that you likely would infrequently need a guide to suss out the greater meaning behind. As far as the Japanese version goes, there are actually quite a large amount of differences. There are some things relating to the disk system itself, like the title screen music being a bit different and the bosses doing monster roars thanks to the extra audio channel, but a lot of things are just outright revisions between the Japanese and English versions. Instead of a whole new boss in the 5th palace, it's just a harder version of the 2nd palace's boss, the dragon boss in the 6th dungeon is easier due to an exploit in how his arena is designed, but the final boss, Link's Shadow, is actually even harder in this version since his AI is smart enough to the point where you can't just duck in a corner to kill him really easy like in the NES version. The most annoying part of this version is that, even though you DO need less EXP to level up, when you die, your levels get reset back down to whichever of your three stats are lowest. If you have Magic level 2, Health level 3, and Sword level 8, they all go back to level 2 if you game over, because Magic is your lowest stat. I actually spent 3 or 4 hours grinding off-stream after my first stream to just get to level 8 in all of my stats so I wouldn't need to worry about it for the rest of my playthrough XD. The Japanese version is generally just different instead of better or worse, but that last point in particular makes this version of the game difficult to recommend. The presentation is as excellent as you'd expect from Nintendo. The graphics are great with well-detailed sprites and good combat animations. The music is excellent and iconic, and it's actually the reason I even considered going back to the game in the first place. One day I had the temple theme stuck in my head, but I just couldn't remember what game it was from XP. As soon as I did, I resolved to finally give this game another try to complete it X3 Verdict: Highly Recommended. It may be difficult to a fault, and the English translation does make some of the adventure aspects more difficult than they were intended to be, but this is still an excellent game in the side-scrolling action/adventure genre. I enjoyed this game way more than I thought I would, and while it certainly still isn't for everybody, it is well worth giving a chance if you're into these sorts of old games and don't mind a bit of a challenge. So ends my journey not only of playing through the Salburg Atelier games but also all five of the main series of Atelier games that never were released in English. I may've done it in a weird order (4, 5, 1, 2, 3), but it offered a very cool perspective on just how the series had changed and when. This is the final adventure in the main series in Salburg, and it had some big shoes to fill after how good Atelier Elie was, and it overall did a pretty darn solid job of filling them! This is yet another game that actually doesn't record in-game time in any way, so I just gotta reckon that it took me some 40 odd hours of playtime over the course of a week to beat the Japanese version of the game with the best ending on the original hardware (using guides online a lot to know what to do and when ^^;).
Despite what the title implies, this is actually a prequel to the other two Atelier games in the Salburg series. It follows the titular character Lilie, an alchemist who has just come with her mentor Dorunie and their two students Helmina and Ingrid to try and establish an alchemy academy in Salburg (the very same academy that Marie and Elie would go on to attend). There are a colorful cast of characters you can recruit in your party, from Karin the tomboyish blacksmith to Gerhard the weapons dealer, and oodles of quests and events involving them you can engage with for more story and goodies. This character writing especially is definitely where this game shines above its predecessors. In prior Atelier games, side quests and more miscellaneous events usually involved just that character and the titular alchemist or perhaps one or two other characters with whom that character was a sort of dedicated pair with (like how your fellow alchemy students would almost always have events relating to one another in Atelier Elie). in Atelier Lilie, the city feels much more alive in how the characters all seem to know each other and interact with each other from time to time in event to event. It takes the good dialogue writing that's been a consistent strength of the series and puts it to some real work in fleshing out the relationships of people with one another and with their new alchemy-obsessed neighbors (that being you). With Lilie and her fellow alchemists being immigrants to Salburg, there's a strong general theme of acceptance of others. Atelier Lilie is a larger story about how we're not all so different if we're just willing to be kind to one another and not judge based on prejudices. It can come off as a little cheesy at times, but in the current state of the world, it was an optimistic story that I was more than happy to throw myself into. It also continues and expands the trend that Atelier Elie started with having some endings be related to romancing certain male characters, of which there are many more this time. I actually couldn't really engage with this system, as I messed up a choice RIGHT at the start (you can basically pick if you want romance to be an option or not, and I didn't really realize what a final choice that was and picked that I didn't XP), but the male characters themselves are much more appealingly written than they were in Atelier Elie, for sure (with Gerhard being my favorite ^w^). Lilie also is clearly at least somewhat curious about her more attractive female companions (given the more-than-friendly descriptions of them she gives them and conversations she has with them at times), but there's no actual same-sex relationships in the game. That said, unfortunate as it may be, as much as I love the generally asexually-coded nature of the protagonists in these games, Lilie is actually a compellingly written character in regards to her sexuality, and it was an element of her character I really enjoyed~. The main core of the gameplay isn't that dissimilar from the prior two Atelier games, but it is the last in this style of item management. Once again you can't walk around the wilderness to explore and simply "find" items at a location you travel to. Once again items do not have unique properties between themselves, and one Tar Fruit is exactly as good as any other Tar Fruit. Expiration dates on items also aren't a thing yet. You're also still doing requests (another long-running series staple) at the bar in town to earn money and popularity, with even a new kind of quest in addition to the specific and general category-requests you'd gotten before, where you fulfill a request monthly for a period for a big payout at the end. They have made it a little bit harder to do the general category requests than it was in Elie (you no longer have the bartender's happier or angrier facial expressions as a guide for how suited what you're trying to sell is), but overall it's very much a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach to things. The way alchemy is done also more or less follows these lines, but with some new twists. You still have combining ingredients to make items with a certain degree of success based on your alchemy level. Also still present from Atelier Elie is the system of blended synthesis, where you tweak the ratios of one ingredient to another to try and make the best version of that item you possibly can (if you so desire). The new addition here is that "original synthesis" (making something totally from scratch given only vague hints) has been nixed for "rough synthesis", where you swap items into other recipes (like one type of metal instead of the one listed in the recipe book) to try and make new items. It isn't a system I super dislike, and it also isn't one you necessarily need to engage with a ton, but there are a LOT of items only available through rough synthesis (compared to how few were available through original synthesis), and you'll need to interact with this system a lot if you want to see the game's best ending. Part of my frustration with things like that is down to how poorly made and inconsistent in accuracy the guides online for this game are, but part of it is also down to just how strange and arbitrary the game is about certain things. For starters, having percentage-based synthesis successes just isn't a good system to base EVERYTHING around, especially when you often have a -20% (so max 80% success rate) penalty for the atelier being dirty, which it often is, and you can't actually effectively clean it yourself. You need to wait for the cleaning fairy to come around and pay him to do it. That was a cute mechanic back when the atelier's cleanliness was just an aesthetic feature, but it's actively a pretty annoying burden in Lilie, and it leads to a LOT of save/loading to undo very costly failures. This also extends into the rough and blend synthesis. A main element of the game is the annual tradesmen exhibitions at the castle. You and your gang are committed to convincing the alchemy-illiterate nobility that your academy (and alchemy in general) is something worth investing in both monetarily and socially, so winning these competitions is a key way to get funding for your academy if you don't wanna get that 150,000 gold yourself (that being the general end-state of the game, outside of a few others). It really behooves you to do well in these, for both money and story reasons, and so you end up spending a LOT of time messing around trying to perfect the recipe you're going to submit that year (and that's if the item you're trying to perfect even CAN be made well enough to win the contest). The poor signposting around what is even eligible for which theme of submission each year (until the day of submission) is one really annoying thing, and the difficulty in perfecting the blend synthesis AND the failures that things like poor cleanliness cause are a consistent annoyance the game faces. The general weirdness and frustration of play also extends to story events. Unlike in prior games, there are a lot more events that correspond to specific flags you need to trigger while playing, but even with those flags hit, whether or not the event actually spawns seems to be down to an internal RNG that the player just needs to hope lands in their favor. Over a LOT of save/loading to perfect certain things and make the most efficient use of my time, I also experienced a lot of confusion over just how and why certain events would happen in some saves and not in others when I'd done effectively the exact same thing in each. There's no cross-continental journey between you and the best ending like in Atelier Elie, so that's one thing, but the events are generally really sweet and well-written, and are some of the biggest highlights of the game, so the difficulty with which they're accessed is a really sour yet necessary note to end talking about this part of the game with. The presentation is excellent as Gust had always done. The music is once again fresh feeling remixes of old tracks (such as the ever iconic Salburg workshop theme) as well as great new ones too. The game's art style is refined just a bit more from Elie, and it still looks great. Character designs are iconic and colorful in a very appealing way, and the whole game has a very homey experience to it. Verdict: Highly Recommended. As much as certain elements of the game frustrate me, they're elements that mostly only frustrate in the context of trying to get the best ending(s). Overall, Atelier Lilie is a great further refinement of the formula that was innovated upon with Atelier Elie, and is just as worth playing as that game. Upon reflection, seeing JUST how different this game and Atelier Judie are makes me want to apologize to Judie a bit. Sure, I'm still not a huge fan of the writing or a lot of the design in that game, but seeing firsthand JUST how ambitious that game was in changing things makes me respect it a lot more, despite how badly it fumbles things. Lilie is a wonderful capstone on the Salburg trilogy, and definitely should not be passed up if you enjoyed Atelier Marie or Atelier Elie~. This was something my mom got out of a bargain bin for me as a kid, and it was always a favorite of mine despite not really being any good at it. I used Game Genie cheats to beat it back then, but I'd been feeling like giving it a replay for quite a while, although I was disappointed to learn that the arcade version on the Switch eShop was different enough from the SNES version I knew that I know I would've not liked that version very much. I was so stoked when Joe & Mac was announced as a game coming to Switch Online's SNES service, and I was so excited that I played all the way through it that very day. I didn't use any save states and managed to beat it fair and square on normal mode this time ^w^. It took me about 50 minutes to beat the Japanese version of the game on my Switch.
Joe & Mac is a port of an early 90's arcade game by Data East, and it has a fittingly "doing exactly what it needs to" level of plot to match. Joe & Mac live in a caveman tribe, but the evil cavemen from another tribe have come and stolen all of their Cave Babes! (as the US localization so hilariously calls them XD). They set off to save them and teach those nasty big-nosed cavemen a lesson. Joe & Mac is a pretty short game, with only a dozen or so stages that can often be completed pretty darn quick, but this is a game where the boss fights are by far the headliner and main event. Joe & Mac have a special high jump and their clubs to whack things with, but everyone knows that firing from a distance has always been the thinking warrior's tactic of choice. Joe & Mac follow this methodology and have a series of ancient tools to throw at enemies if they find one of the powerups in a stage, although they can only hold one at a time. You have bones (rapid fire but low damage), boomerangs (slower than bones but more powerful), fire (only one thrown at a time, but VERY powerful), and wheels (two thrown at a time but pretty tough and can climb up walls) to use against your foes, and different weapons are more useful at different times. The game is definitely still an arcade game with its difficulty, but the stages and especially the bosses are really tightly designed and great fun to fight. Sure, there are a couple of bosses who are a little too awkward or arbitrary in their patterns for my tastes, but by and large they succeed in being worth the price of entry. The presentation is pretty darn good too~. Joe & Mac have big expressive faces for reacting to things as do their caveman enemies (who are working with the dinosaurs for some reason, but just try not to think about it :b), but again the real stars here are the bosses. The music and especially sound design compliment the bosses great too, with the bosses having big, expressive "I'M HIT!" animations every time they lose a tick of life, and a big "GEH!" sound effect as well that has stuck with me as a kid. It's a big, silly arcadey experience and the graphics and sound do a great job of carrying that forward too. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a game I hadn't played in a long time, but it's one that's held up really damn well over the years. It very much scratches the itch in the part of my brain that always yearns for more Mega Man, and while it's not exactly that same style of gameplay, it's close enough that I love it. If you're a fan of 2D action games and don't mind a bit of a challenge, this is definitely one not to pass up on, especially if you already have Switch Online so you can play it for free via the SNES service~. Just as 1987 and 1988 seemed to be the peak years of sidescrolling action/adventure games in the vein of Zelda 2, 1997 to 1998 seemed to be the peak of 3D action/adventure games in the style of Ocarina of Time (though I use both Zeldas here as simple examples, as Nintendo certainly didn't invent either genre). Konami had Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, Nintendo had Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Capcom had Mega Man Legends, and SquareSoft had Brave Fencer Musashi. Though it's in a similar genre to those other three games, there is a decidedly SquareSoft twist to the formula, as you would certainly expect from them. This was another game I got relatively far in (about halfway through) as a kid, but I ended up putting it down and just never going back to it for some reason or another. This time I was determined to see the game to its conclusion, though, and in the course of about 13.5 hours, I beat the second game based (extremely loosely) on Miyamoto Musashi I've played in the past six or so months XD
The story takes place in the Yakuinikku kingdom, where while the king and queen are on vacation, they find themselves under attack by the Ru Koaaru Empire. In dire straights, they decide to use the princess's magic to summon the legendary hero Musashi, who had saved the kingdom from the king of darkness over a hundred years ago. Upon his successful summoning, however, they find that he's a bit more pint-sized than they imagined him to be, and with a pretty smart mouth as well. Even though the princess ends up getting kidnapped, Musashi sets off on a mission to save her (even if it's mostly only to let him return home to his own world) by finding the five seals of the five rings (a reference to the real life Musashi) and defeating their five guardians. Very much like Mega Man Legends or Mystical Ninja, this game's story is mostly here to be entertaining, and while it might not be quite as memorable as Mega Man, it still manages to be pretty good fun and packed with silly puns and larger than life, buffoonish characters. It does a fine job of setting the stakes and making the world itself a compelling place to explore and fight in. And fight in this world you absolutely will, as this is an action adventure game! Unlike Ocarina of Time or Mega Man Legends, however, this is a top-down game more like a traditional 2D Zelda rather than a 3D Zelda. There's enough jumping and platforming to put it firmly into the 3D genre rather than the 2D one, but the overall design philosophies veer harder towards something older despite it coming out in 1998. Not that that's a bad thing, as Musashi uses his two swords (another iconic bit referencing the historical figure) to do various combos and deal out magical attacks using the seals you've broken. There's even a system of hurling one of your swords into an enemy to absorb its power to give yourself a special magic attack! There are also the many villagers and workers in the castle who've been kidnapped and hidden in crystals for you to find out in the world. Not only will they be grateful for you saving them, but every one you save increases your magic meter a little, and some will even craft you special upgrades or teach you new combos~. However, for whatever Musashi has in flavor and style, it also ends up having quite the amount of baggage trying to juggle and balance all of those different pieces. While the game is solidly enough put together, it's often too focused on gimmicks or just too poorly signposted, and it gets in the way of the adventure and the fun. There are some really annoyingly difficult vehicle sections, a hell of a final gauntlet to the final boss, a money system that's almost useless because there's almost nothing to buy, a really annoying day/night system with almost no meaningful purpose, and some really awkward platforming puzzles you're forced to do several times to pad out the playtime. That's only naming the bigger problems off the top of my head, but that's not even an entirely exhaustive list. This game is most certainly a PS1-era SquareSoft product in how it's entertainingly written and has ambitiously designed systems, but it's also a SquareSoft production in how just how much of that stuff tends to trip over itself as a result of its ambition. The presentation of the game is very good, as one would expect from a SquareSoft game of this era. The characters are colorful and easily recognizable despite their small sizes, the enemy design is memorable, and the music is quite good too. None of it is my favorite in particular of a SquareSoft PS1 game, sure, but it's all very well done and none of it feels like it's only their B-team effort or anything. Verdict: Recommended. There's a lot to enjoy in Musashi, but there's also a lot to complain about. This is definitely more along the lines of "cool but significantly flawed" that Mystical Ninja: Starring Goemon is than the sort of timeless classic that Mega Man Legends is. If you're into retro 3D action/adventure games, than this is definitely one you should check out, as Musashi definitely does more right than it does wrong despite all its problems. However, if the awkward nonsense that retro games are so often full of bother you to a significant point, then you are likely going to not enjoy your time with this game very much and will feel your time well wasted as a result of trying it. Better known as Mega Man Legends, this marked the tail end of my incredible month-ish long Mega Man binge, and was the 26th game in the series that I played over the course of April to May this year. This is a game I very briefly tried when I was younger, but I never ended up going back to it for some reason or another. Japanese PSN doesn't have the PS1 versions of the Legends games, but it does have their native PSP ports! They seemed to be pretty straight-up ports with very little change, so I decided to give it a whirl via my PSTV to see mostly how the controls had been changed, if at all. It took me about 8 hours to do just about everything in the Japanese version of the game under the helpful guidance of my resident Mega Man Legends fan, DogStrong~.
Mega Man Legends tells the story of a far flung future's Mega Man. Sure, his name may be Rock (at least in the Japanese version), but this is many many years after even the Mega Man X games end (and likely the Zero games too). The world has been flooded, and the last remnants of humanity survive on their tiny islands by scavenging parts from old technology, and the people who do that scavenging are called "Digouters" (which is, yes, a VERY silly name X3). Rock, his adoptive sister Roll, their grandpa Barrel, and their robotic monkey assistant Data are one such Digouter team, but they find themselves stranded on a small island after their ship breaks down. Rock's quest begins as just one to repair their ship so they can leave, but it quickly evolves into a mission to protect the island from the vicious bandits attacking it and finding the island's hidden treasure before they can! The story isn't going for any super huge message, ultimately, but it's super engagingly told. The Japanese voice acting is excellent, and it's helped a ton by the cast of colorful characters that inhabit the island. Rock and friends are of course quite memorable, but the same goes for the ever charismatic antagonists of the Bonne family, who are the bandits trying to foil you at every turn. They are a very endearing Team Rocket-kind of bad guys, and their big machines and braggadocios natures make them steal every scene they're in. This is helped a TON by the art style and graphics of the game, which take on a kind of "anime but 3D"-style. The cutscenes are directed in such a way that the faces never look uncanny or weird, and the piles and piles of face textures in the game's files can attest to just how much work went into making every shot look just the way it was intended. For a 3D game from 1998, the graphics hold up super well even now, and that's something not many stylized graphics from that generation can too easily boast about. The gameplay is very much like a somewhat short Zelda-like experience. The game has an overworld, three main dungeons, and a final dungeon each hiding different objectives you'll need on your quest to uncover the island's biggest secret. On the way, you'll fight tons of ancient Reaverbots guarding these ruins, as well as big boss Reaverbots and the big boss bots the Bonne's pilot. You can help even the odds a bit by finding money to buy extra upgrades for defense and upgrade your special weapons, and you can also buy and find parts you can equip to boost your attack power, rate of fire, special weapon damage, and how many bullets you can fire at once. The game isn't the hardest game I've played of the era, but it's definitely on the tougher side for a Zelda-style game. Part of that is due to the weird, gimmicky vehicle defense sections the game sometimes throws at you (which aren't impossible, sure, but they're easily the hardest parts of the game), part of that is down to the often hazy signposting, but part of that is also down to the controls. I mentioned earlier that I bought the PSP version very curious about how it controlled, and while the control with the joypad (or joystick in my case, as I used a PS3 controller), they're actually still not very good compared to the original controls. My friend tells me this game controls a lot like the PS1 Armored Core games (which they also really like), as the default controls use tank controls on the D-pad and then use R1 and L1 to strafe back and forth. Circle-strafing is your best friend for the boss encounters in this game, and the main reason the other control methods (one swapping the function of right and left on the D-pad with the L1 and R1 buttons, and the other giving you something resembling analog control instead of the D-pad, but no camera control on the right stick as the PSP of course doesn't have one) are bad is because circle strafing doesn't work with them. Sure, those control styles are more familiar, but you're going to have a MUCH harder time playing that way because of your inability to circle strafe properly. The game has a kind of lock-on feature, but it locks you in place, so it's very useful if you wanna shoot above or below you, but it's not very useful if a giant robot dog is about to charge you to death and eat your face. This is definitely one of those old games where it simply controls the way it does, and doesn't have any sort of conventions to stick to (in fairness, 3D was still fairly new), and the controls definitely take some getting used to for most players. Once you get the controls down, though, the game has some really fun dungeons and bosses awaiting you, even if there isn't much in the way of puzzles like the dungeons in Zelda tend to have. In true Mega Man fashion, this is an action game first and a platformer second, so fighting stuff is the main mechanical thing on display here more than pushing switches or block puzzles. As mentioned before, the presentation graphically is absolutely excellent in how it compliments the story as well as creates a timeless graphical style. The music is also quite good, fitting the mood nicely and making battles intense and dramatic. The last thing I'll mention about the graphics is specifically how they are in this PSP port of the game, as they're probably the biggest thing you'll notice that're different from the original. The game isn't a PS1 classic or anything emulated. This is a proper native port to PSP, and so they've had to recreate that old graphical style on the PSP's architecture, and for the most part they've done a pretty darn good job. The only real shortcoming is how a lot of scenery fits together. Stand too close to a wall and you'll likely find its texture hovering slightly in front of where the wall actually stops, and Mega Man clipping into walls slightly or one wall's texture overcoming the one next to it slightly are pretty common graphical hiccups that the PS1 version doesn't really have in the same way (so I'm told). It's honestly barely significant enough to be worth mentioning, but given how little there seems to be online about these versions of the game in English, I thought it was worth at least a passing mention. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This was still the baby steps of 3D for Capcom, but even without Ocarina of Time laying the groundwork yet (as this came out that same year), they managed to make a really compelling and competent action/adventure game in 3D! Sure, the controls aren't perfect and it's a bit short, but if you can get over the short length and adapt to the controls, there is a ton to fall in love with here. If you think you can grapple with those weird tank controls and can find it for a price that's right, this is definitely a game you don't wanna miss if 3D action/adventure games are at all something you like. |
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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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