I'm not gonna beat around the bush: I picked up Cave Story+ on the Switch MOSTLY because I wanted the keychain it comes with. I REALLY love Cave Story, and the chance to get more tat for it was something I certainly wanted. Throw that in with the Co-op update they put in recently, and that was more than enough to sell me on the Switch version. I'm fairly sure I've written a Cave Story review on here before, so I'm going to keep this review down to mostly just the differences between the DSi port with which I am so familiar and this new Switch iteration.
Cave Story as a concept is basically Planescape Torment meets Contra. It's an action adventure run'n'gun game (a bit like Contra) where the premise of the narrative is that you're going in with just absolutely no context and the story of the world unfolds around you as you take part in it (like Planescape Torment). It's a great little action game by itself, and the story has always held a soft place in my heart . My only slight caveat would be that it is basically impossible to know how to access the final dungeon and boss fight for the best ending your first way through. If you don't want to play through the game again (it's only like 4 or 5 hours in the first place if you aren't dying too much), I'd recommend using a guide to know what you should look out for, because the things you need to do to do it also just make the main game far easier. The story mode of Cave Story+ is almost exactly the same game with a few very minor changes. The Bubbler gun is now called The Bubbline, a location of a dog in the Sand Zone has been changed along with your ability to now carry multiple dogs at once, and the long corridor between the final boss rush and the entrance to that area has been completely removed. Other than a few minor translation tweaks, the game is just the same as it always was. Included in this port are the aforementioned 2-player co-op, where the second player can play as just about any of the promo-main character costumes that have been out (like the seasonal ones), the alternate difficulty costumes, or even just about anyone who shares a similar character model with the main character whom you encounter in the story (although you do need to meet them in the story first to unlock those costumes). I was unable to try that mode. They've also added some new time-trial maps in their new Challenge mode, although I didn't really find them interesting enough to give them too much attention. Additionally, from the options screen on the main menu, you can change between the graphics of the original game and the new smoother look of CS+, as well as shifting between the original music score, CS+'s, and several other remixed sets. You can even switch the jump and shoot buttons if you want. Verdict: Recommended. This is a great port of Cave Story, and a great way to experience the game on a modern system if you'd rather have it portable than on PC.
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My Youkai Watch roll continues with the spin-off of the action-style diversion from the 2nd game. It's a mission-based class-focused 4-player action game with all the charm that Youkai Watch usually has. It's certainly not what I'd expected it'd be, but I still had a good deal of fun with it.
The story is all very light hearted and silly in normal Youkai Watch affair. To be honest, as far as narrative is concerned, this is probably the Youkai Watch game I've played that stays the most on focus with little mandatory filler. Given the title, there are a LOT of Ghost Busters references, as well as the Star Wars references and Terminator references they love so much. The persistant characters of Sgt. Burly, Fubuki Chan, and Koma San really make the interactions funny but varied. I enjoyed the story bits for the silliness that they are. The core gameplay is going into a mission, completing the objective, and getting to the evac point. If you run out of time (missions always have very generous time limits, though) or die before getting to the evac, everything you did (XP collected, items found, Youkai befriended) will be GONE. The missions are split up into 3 types, with a 4th added in the free expansion. The first are story missions, where you have to follow a set of objectives in relation to the story and then get to the evac point. Next are Patrol missions, where you just wander around a location fighting Youkai with the main goal to befriend them. Then you have Big Boss missions, which are just re-fighting the bosses from the story mode outside of the missions in order to farm their dropped items. You also have Super and Hell difficulties to fight these bosses on, and you can get some seriously good rewards for the Super and Hell ones, like rare crafting materials, evolution items, and even befriending the bosses themselves as playable characters! Lastly, the expansion added "New Challenge" missions, which are basically just time-trials for boss rushes and patrol modes that focus on grinding money/XP. It's by far the best way to grind cash/XP. Each of the Big Boss and Story missions have 2 sets of 3 different tiers of rewards you can get (rare, uncommon, common), with each version of the game having a higher chance of getting the items in a certain set. There are also very rare item and Youkai prizes that can ONLY be gotten by beating Hell-modes of bosses in a 4-player match, so I never got any of those . There is a gear system and a crafting system, but that just entails picking up items from fallen foes and combining them with money/XP to craft them. The best stuff requires a LOT of boss farming, of course. However, a nice change from Youkai Watch 2 is that instead of Youkai being able to hold one or two equipment items or one spirit orbs, they can ALL hold one of each, which is nice. It's worth mentioning that your cash IS your XP. You don't get XP just for defeating enemies. Enemies might drop crafting items or they might drop Oni Orbs, which function as both your money and XP. You spend Oni Orbs to level up characters, buy/craft items at the shop, and evolve your Youkai. It's interesting, and also means it's very easy to just PUMP levels into a new guy you wanna try using. The gameplay itself is pretty fun. You have tanks, healers, attackers, and rangers. Tanks are very fat, have high defense, and taunt enemy fire. Healers have friendly buffs and heal the party. Attackers are DPS, and rangers focus on debuffing the enemy and laying traps. Playing by yourself, you're gonna be wanting to play the attacker most all the time, but you can switch between characters on the fly during the mission, so you can shift roles as you see fit. It's a bit fiddly to do with the touch screen, but if you have a NEW model 3DS, the ZR button handles it, and it's a lot lot faster. I really quite liked the actual combat. Having a DPS with dodge as my main (Jibanyan), I loved getting really up close and personal, and then dodging JUST at the right second to have him hit my invincibility frames. Especially the later bosses which you might fight underleveled, the bosses are certainly the highlight of the game for me. I can only imagine how fun they are with friends (whom I had none to play with ;A;). A bit of a problem this game has is the controls, tbh. It's just built in the Youkai Watch 2 engine, so it has a lot of the control and camera hang-ups of that game, but this is an action game, so they're far more pronounced. R and L control the camera's rotation, but you more or less never need to do that because you can only rotate it slightly on the overworld (like in YW2), and during boss battles you have a boss-targeting feature you can activate by a touch screen button (or with ZL on a New model). Meanwhile, the buttons to change whom you're targeting are left and right on the D-pad for enemy targeting, and up and down for allies. You also have two consumable items you can bring into each mission which can ONLY be used by touching them on the touch screen. Making up and down each be a consumable, left and right being rotating the camera, and making R and L switch between allies and enemies targeting receptively would've made this game control far far better. In terms of performance, the game runs servicably. Oddly enough, it seems to have more trouble in earlier, easier missions, but the later ones all ran just fine, even on a non-New model 3DS. This IS a Youkai Watch game, so it has a lot of the issues those games have in terms of how the content is laid out. There are quite a lot of Youkai, but because of that, it can be quite difficult to find the one you want, let alone actually get him to join you with the usual low chance the rarer guys have in Youkai Watch. Add to that how the patrol missions have rotating special Youkai in them and also have a 20 minute time limit, and it can be absolutely infuriating to get your favorite Youkai to join the group. There's a TON of VERY hard end-game content, especially with the Gettogumi downloadable expansion they released for free which you can import your Shiroinutai or Akanekodan save directly into. If you wanna spend an absolute eternity grinding for XP to do more crazy boss fights, you bet your sweet ass you can do that for HOURS on end. You can do bosses under the recommended level, but it's DAMN hard without human players to assist you. With human players, it's far more manageable. Verdict: Recommended. It's a fun action game. If you like Youkai Watch and have friends who have Japanese 3DS's to play this with you on than this is a MUST buy. Of course, no one in the States actually has that qualifier list, so it's not so important. It's a competent budget action game. If you like action games on Japanese 3DS and can find it for like $20, it's a fun romp for sure I fell in love with Youkai Watch after I played through the first one last year. It had some problems, but it still absolutely captivated me, and I FINALLY got around to playing through the sequel, and it's pretty damn good! It's exactly what a sequel should strive to be: Not too different, but fixes (or at least addresses) a LOT of the problems the first game had.
The story this time around is okay, but still nothing super special. It really does come off the feeling that they write all of the anime stories first and then adapt them to a game, because even though the main kind of conflict is there, you still get these almost completely unrelated side-stories now and again. There aren't NEARLY as many side stories as in the first game though. The pacing of the main story itself is a bit touch-and-go with how quickly some plot threads are picked up only to be very hurriedly resolved, but there aren't any loose ends at the end. It's serviceable and it makes you care enough, which is fine for me. What's MUCH better is the dialogue between characters. The first game was really just Keita/Fumi, their friends, and Whisper as the main cast. Aside from that it was almost entirely small small roles, even leading up to the main bad guy. This game makes Jibanyan his own character, a snarky, somewhat self-centered braggart and he plays a wonderful foil to Whisper's new attitude of being a know-it-all who really doesn't know it all. The addition of Jibanyan as an actually persistent character to the story really enhances the entertainment value. Once you tie that in with all of the silly references to things like Star Wars and Terminator, and you have a game that gave me more than one good belly laugh X3 The development of the map is a bit like the jump from Pokemon 1st gen to 2nd gen, but not quite as substantial in its changes to previous areas. This is more like Pokemon Colosseum to Pokemon Gale of Darkness, or Yakuza 1 to Yakuza 2. The original town remains completely unchanged, more or less, in its locations and music, but several new areas have been added in and around it to flesh it out more. However, actually traversing the map has been made somewhat tedious at times for the sake of realism. Now the main gimmick of this game is that you travel back in time to save the future, so you essentially have an entirely new map in the old version of the main town. You also can now ride the train in the main town to different stops, one of which is a country village, one of which is a sea-side town, but only the village has a past-version to go to as well. Going between all of these can come off as not fun occasionally if you're trying to do anything but the main story. Now while you do have warp-points you can go to like in the first game, for a VERY long time, almost until you've beaten the main story, you only have one point in the map where you can actually go between the past and the present, and this place is a train ride away from the main town. So going to the past main town is a train-ride cut-scene away from that point. Additionally, there are over a dozen stops on the present's train-line that are just train stations with no warps or areas outside of them, so you can get stuck on the train for quite a while if you're pressing buttons too quickly and miss your stop. However this isn't all entirely terrible. You sometimes have Youkai encounter battles on the train between stops, you sometimes get silly conversations between the main character, Whisper, and Jibanyan, and you sometimes get characters to come up to you and give you rare items (sometimes obscenely rare evolution items, which is kinda nice). You can also just press start to skip these scenes, so it isn't as bad as most Squenix games in that regard The combat system remains largely unchanged. You still have the Youkai family types from before, and you still have the elemental rock-paper-scissors mechanic from the first game. Your Youkai still battle in real time, and you still can't explicitly control them at any time. The main modifications to combat have been G-moves and Pecking. Once you hit about halfway in the story, you get the Zero-Watch, which allows you to do those moves. Instead of a normal special move, if the surrounding Youkai have their spirit gauges full as well, they can add their energy to the middle-Youkai that you've selected to do a version of their special with increased power. Pecking is a bottom-screen mini-game that can be done once-per-enemy (except most bosses) in a battle. Once they've started slacking or have been hit with a debuff, you can peck them similarly to how you pin them to aim at them. This starts a mini-game on the bottom screen where you can tap areas on them to either do extra damage, refill your spirit gauges a bit, get extra money for the battle, or, most importantly, increase your chances to become friends with them that battle. Most of the significant changes to this part have been made in terms of player information and ease of play. Aiming over a Youkai to pin them now shows their elemental type (unless they're a special boss), whether or not you've caught them or not, and what kind of food they like. This isn't all entirely perfect though. The food items themselves still don't tell you anywhere in the game what food-type they actually fall under, so you've either gotta trial-and-error it or look up the wiki like I did. Given that they added new food types in this game, that makes it just has hard. Other annoying things like the only way to get the Soba food item being to repeated refresh the map to make the Soba delivery guy's cart fall over, and the food items, while being improved, are still more annoying than they have to be. And even with the addition of pecking, you still don't have a Pokeball-like system where you can essentially ensure you befriend a new Youkai on your first meeting. You've just gotta do the friend-peck and give them your best food and hope. Lastly, the gimmick of "Bony Spirits" (Genso) and "Fleshy Souls" (Honke) are two different gangs in the game, which kind act like the sexual dimorphism in Pokemon games. There will usually be slight differences in the Youkai between each group, but other than that they're the same functionally. HOWEVER, the thing that tells you whether or not you've already befriended that Youkai only tells you if you've befriended the Youkai of that specific tribe, which can lead to you misprioritizing whom to focus on befriending in a battle. On that note, you can feed more than one Youkai per battle now, so you do have one kinda extra thing in your friend-making arsenal. The last most notable flaw this game has is in its base design of how you find and befriend Youkai. The thing about Pokemon is that it has trainers, and by battling lots of trainers, you can see lots of Pokemon you might not otherwise know about because you hadn't gone to the area they're in at whatever time you gotta go there. Youkai Watch doesn't have trainers, so while you can generally befriend any Youkai you fight (outside of some story events), if you don't go to the area that has them, you're not gonna find them. I put 70+ hours into this game, and I still hadn't seen like a third of the Youkai in the game at least. This game just has too many Youkai, and they really should've slimmed some of the literal reskin-Youkai (of which only a couple more are added in this game, but not nearly as many as there were in the original roster, and most of them are very very rare, not common, like the first gen's) out of the roster to make sure you'd actually see a lot of the newer ones. The more recent Pokemon games have made this mistake as well: A roster of more than 300 is just getting way too crowded, and it makes it very very likely you might just never run into some of your favorites. Other miscellaneous improvements and changes have been added to the game. You have many more apps on your Youkai Watch now, so you can check things like the weather forecast, watch movie events over again, change the background music (once you've unlocked them with the too-rare music cards, tbh), track the Youkai spots you've found, etc. You also now can actually interact with other players in a Pokemon-style, as you can now trade Youkai between games, battle other player's teams, and even do side-mini-games with them like Youkai Watch Blasters (not the full release that came out later, but a slimmed down version that just takes place in the main city, no bosses or story or anything) which is a kind of action-spin on the Oni Jikan activity. Oni Jikan is still in the game, but it happens less frequently, you don't need to actually fight Aka Oni to lose anymore (you just instantly die when he catches you), you have more opportunities to fight back, the patrol guards are more forgiving in their line of sight (which STILL isn't displayed on your radar ), and you can just activate it any time you want if you just wanna play it yourself. Oni Jikan has been made a bit better, but I still don't enjoy it very much. Edit: A re-read of my Youkai Watch 1 review made me want to add a thing or two which I felt was worth mentioning. A big reason this game has such a problem with helping you actually find all the Youkai is because this game has far fewer dungeons than the first game. That combined with how they're basically putting another 120 Youkai into what is only a little more space than the first game had, makes for some Youkai being quite unreasonably difficult to find. Verdict: Highly recommended. If you like games like Pokemon and Shin Megami Tensei for their gameplay, I would very highly recommend Youkai Watch. It's a fantastically fun spin on the formula, and while it still isn't quite perfect, this is a great upgrade from the first game. The links to the first game are very few, so it's perfectly simple to just hop into this game and completely skip the first one without feeling lost, in my opinion. |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
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