Completing one last game in 2020, I picked another indie game from the PC pile that I've been meaning to get to for ages. This came out around the same time as Titan Souls did, and they have similar perspectives and gameplay styles, so I often confuse them ^^;. But now after 4 or so hours with it, I've beaten this game too, so I need not confuse them any more XD.
Jotun is the story of Thora, a viking who died a dishonorable death (i.e. not one in combat) when her boat wrecked at sea. Instead of the cold abyss she thinks awaits her, though, she wakes up in a space between worlds. The gods, impressed by her life of struggle, honor, and battle, have seen it fit to give her one more opportunity into Valhalla. If she can impress them by defeating them in battle, she will earn her place in paradise. The story is largely a stylistic thing more than anything else, as we learn a bit about Norse mythology and Thora's past, but it fits the atmosphere really well for what is, at its core, an action game. Jotun is a fair bit like Titan Souls, in how you're a little character in a Zelda-like perspective who needs to defeat a bunch of big bosses to complete their quest, but past that the similarities are far more scant. In Jotun, your main attacks are your light and heavy attacks you have with your axe, and your main method of dodging is a dodge roll. You can also find magic to be used in charges as you explore around the different circles of the afterlife. That's right, "explore", because this game has exploration elements! There is an intro level to the game with two relatively easy bosses in it, and then there are 8 more levels (2 per boss) with four bosses between them and then one final boss after that. The bosses are quite tough (even the first ones), and unlike Titan Souls they (and you) have health bars you'll need to deplete as they go through several battle phases. The bosses always felt like a fair challenge, and getting to one was always exciting and fun. The levels you explore are quite different in their design, and they are often just as much about exploration to find where to go as they are solving puzzles and fighting small mobs. There's a really good diversity between the stages for what obstacles you'll face and what dangers you'll face in each stage. You can approach the 8 levels in any order you want, and can even save all four bosses until you've beaten all 8 levels. Each level has a max health increase and a new spell hidden in it somewhere, so it can be well worth saving those bosses for later if you're having trouble. The levels have mini maps that show your end goal as well as where the new spells is, but they don't show where you are on that map, so trying to judge where you are to try and find your goals as well as the hidden health increase is important to your success. The worlds are also beautifully crafted in a hand-drawn style. The animations are wonderful as well, and the VA being all in Swedish gives it that extra flare of being taken to another world. The music is good atmospheric tone-setting as well as intense for the boss music. Finding little tidbits around the world just to see how well they're drawn and animated was one of the most fun parts about exploring~. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Where Titan Souls felt a little lacking in content to justify its price, Jotun's exploration and strong myth-based presentation make it feel like a much more complete package. With strong level and puzzle design and great bosses, this is a fantastic indie game to spend an afternoon/evening with.
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Another game from my PC game pile, Titan Souls is a game I heard about ages ago, got free on Twitch Prime fewer ages ago, and then finally decided to play yesterday. I knew it was a tougher game, but I really didn't expect it to be so short, as I finished it in just a little under two hours. It's another PC game you'll absolutely want a controller to play (I used my Xbox One controller), and despite its length it still manages to be a worthwhile investment. I played it on normal mode and killed 17 of the bosses (which I thiiink is all but one of them, but I couldn't find the last one ^^;).
Titan Souls is a game that clearly has some fairly strong inspirations from games like Shadow of the Colossus. You play a little person with only a bow and arrow, and you're in a mysterious land to fight and kill Titans and take their souls. Why are you doing this? It's quite unclear, but the point is that you're here to fight these giant monsters. This is another game that drops you in media res but gives you very scant context even up to the final confrontation, and it's a game that largely leaves you to your own conclusions about whether this quest was justifiable or worth it. Like in Shadow of the Colossus, these large beasts are just minding their own business until you come along to kill them, and unlike in even that game, you don't even have a person you're obviously trying to save. The only things in this land are you and the Titans, so you'll have plenty of time to ponder the nature of your quest as you wander from dwelling to dwelling of where they call home. If you REALLY wanna know a little more of what's going on (and fight an extra secret boss), you'll need to play the game several times on harder difficulties (which I did not do because the normal game was hard enough for me ^^;). Titan Souls is a fairly difficult top-down, Zelda-like combat game where it's not just one hit kills on you, but it's also one hit kills on the bosses as well. Granted, they'll likely have a much easier time killing you than you will killing them, but that element of "just gotta land THE hit" makes it feel almost more like a puzzle game than an action/adventure game. The bosses are quick and tough, but they have patterns you can learn with enough patience. Heck, there were a couple I even managed to beat on my first try. They're not unbeatably hard (at least not on normal mode), but they provide a really nice challenge. The method you have to beat them is with your bow and arrow, but you only have the one arrow. But that's not a problem, since not only can you pick the arrow back up when you miss a shot, but you can also hold a button to have it return to you. However, to draw back your arrow also means to stand still, which can quite understandably be a death sentence if you aren't careful about when you do it. But even upon returning to you, your arrow is still a weapons, and skillfully drawing it back towards you at the right time can be the key to defeating certain bosses who'd rather have their weak point facing away from you. You can also do a dodge roll and run, but other than that this is a fairly simple game mechanically that will have you needing to get quite good at those mechanics if you're going to see its conclusion. The presentation is fairly melancholic in how quiet the world is. The music for the boss fights is fairly pumping, but the non-boss rooms have either fairly subdued music or no music at all. All the better to leave you alone with your thoughts with. The pixel art graphics style is nothing super unique, but it's all very well animated and the bosses all look cool. It's clean and crisp and there's very little danger of ever losing where you or the boss are on the screen due to how frantic things can get, which is an excellent quality for tough combat games to have (yet so many of them seem not to have regardless XP). Verdict: Recommended. I think the asking price for the game might be a bit much for some people, but especially if you plan to do the harder modes, this game has more than enough content to justify the asking price. It's a cleverly crafted little action/puzzle game that is very satisfying to fight bosses in, and if you're looking for a challenge to go through over a weekend then this can be just the ticket. Continuing to go through the large pile of games I have sitting among my Steam, Twitch, and Epic libraries on PC, I decided to finally play through this little gem. Originally a Sega Master System game, I played through around half of the TurboGrafx16 version of this game back on the Wii Virtual Console when I was a kid. I got stuck and couldn't progress back then, but I had really enjoyed my time with it. I figured it was high time I finally put this game to rest, and what better way to do it than with an excellent PC remake? It took me around 3 or 4 hours to beat the game on normal mode with a game pad, and I only had to look up where to go next a couple times ^^;.
Dragon's Trap is the third game in the Wonder Boy series, kinda, as it's a super confusing flow chart of confusing sequel names, but that's not important. What IS important is that the game starts out, the titular Wonder Boy (or Wonder Girl, as the remake gives you the option to choose :D), right at the end of the adventure: The entrance to the Mako Dragon's castle! You barge in, beat up the guards, and kill the dragon easily. But as the game's title suggests, in death, the dragon has the last laugh! A blue flame emanating from his body hits you and morphs you into a disgusting lizard man! And so it is that Wonder Boy/Girl must begin their quest to return to their normal form! Along the way, they'll battle another five dragons in their castles and gain another four monster forms as well! You'll get to be a mouse, a mer-man, a lion, and a bird! Although you can't switch between them at will (you need to visit a special transmutation hut that's hidden in certain areas of the game), each form has different special abilities that will help them get to the next area you need to go to, and they even have different specialties of what weapon they're best with. As you collect more swords, shields, and armor, it pays to check over your equipment in your inventory once you get a new form to make sure that what was previously your best equipment actually still is ^^;. But you have super deep pockets, so thankfully you never need to go and re-buy any equipment. All you gotta do is just swap the toggle in your inventory. The actual gameplay of Dragon's Trap is more like a 2D Zelda, but without the overworld sections of something like Zelda 2 on the NES. The entire world exists along a 2D plane, and you go through it via scrolling left and right, falling down, flying up, and going through doors to access new areas, dungeons, and shops. The dungeons and bosses are challenging but fair, and even though your attack range is short, it never feels like you're underequipped for the job at hand. Each form controls differently enough that you'll likely develop a favorite among them, but not so different that it's like leaning a whole new game. The controls are great and there are secret weapon shops and heart containers scattered all over the world for you to find. The only real issue with the game design is that, in grand retro adventure game fashion, the signposting can be a bit rough in places, and having a playthrough up on YouTube to reference when you need to will likely ease the frustration of wandering around forever ad nauseum X3 You can jump and swing your sword in front of you, and you can even use special consumable weapons you find along the way if the opportunity calls for it, but that's pretty much it. Even though this is a remake, it's also just as much of a port as it is a remake. It's even running along such similar lines that you can press the trigger buttons on the controller to toggle between the old 8-bit graphics and music respectively whenever you want! But although even though that retro goodness is cool (and in some places makes the environments a little easier to see hidden blocks in because it's not hidden by the foreground anymore), the remake takes the old graphics and music and cranks them up to 11. The new orchestrated soundtrack is absolutely fantastic, and basically every track in the whole game is a real banger. The new art assets are beautifully hand-drawn (or at least styled that way) and have really pretty and fluid animations. However, I think the real star of the show is the music, as this game has some of my favorite music I've heard in a game all year. Verdict: Highly Recommended. To paraphrase my friend AJ, Dragon's Trap is at the same time the best game on the Master System but also totally not worth playing on it due to superior ports, and this is definitely the best of those ports. It may be an adventure game that's over 30 years old at this point, but it holds up fantastically well. It's certainly a bit short, but if you like action adventure games at all then this is a fantastic time to be had that won't have you pulling your hair out at the difficulty despite its age. Not many games this old can feel so new with only a fresh coat of paint, but Dragon's Trap is absolutely a game capable of that feat. I might not talk about it THAT much, but I try not to make any secret of it that Cave Story, like La-Mulana, is a game very near and dear to my heart. So then, why in that case did it take me SIX YEARS to play the only other game by the maker of Cave Story since that game? Who's to say :b. But point is, I finally sat down and did it XD. It took me around 2 or 3 hours to beat the game on my PC using a game pad on normal mode.
Like Cave Story before it, Kero Blaster is a game with a cute pixel art style that drops you in media res into an odd and colorful world. You play the role of Frog (presumably) in Cat & Frog corp, which is some kind of disposal company. You play the role of disposer while Cat is your boss who seems to mysteriously get sicker and more deformed as you go on more missions. Your coworkers express concern with you, but ultimately you have a job to do: cleaning up messes, and that means killing monsters! The story is a unique and odd backdrop to the story, but at least on normal mode you aren't given a ton to work on to make it mean much more than just a fun backdrop with oddball characters. This game is absolutely not trying to be Cave Story 2, and it isn't. Though a run'n'gun, this is absolutely not an adventure game. Kero Blaster is a sort of Mega Man game that has you going through 7 levels in linear fashion. You get a new gun or passive ability after beating each boss, and you can collect money in each stage to spend at shops found at the midway point of each stage. You can upgrade your weapons at the weapon shop, and buy more health, heart containers, and extra lives at the health shop (you can also visit the health shop after a game over, which is nice). You have four guns which all fit different situations differently, and the boss design is really good. It's a very well put together action platformer, from the enemy types to the level design. While the game might not be trying to be Cave Story 2 in terms of overall design (though I'd say it certainly matches or surpasses that in mechanical quality), the presentation has that Cave Story charm to a T. The pixel art is simply animated but very pretty looking, and the music is excellent as well. Levels all look and feel different, and hunting for secrets of extra lives and money in them is fun too. Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you like Mega Man-style games, this is absolutely a game you can't afford to miss. While it certainly may not be to the scale of Cave Story, the shooting and platforming have been refined to an even greater degree which makes this a fantastic few hours to play through. Also, beating the game unlocks more challenge modes you can go through if you're not satisfied with your Kero Blast-ing quite yet. Totally worth picking up, especially if it's on sale. That, in that monster of a title, is the final officially released Metroid-like Castlevania game by Konami, and also the last one I hadn't beaten yet. After completing this (and Circle of the Moon last year), I've finally beaten all of them! And it was... not the WORST one I've played, I guess ^^;. As I understand is the case with the rest of the Lords of Shadow games, Mirror of Fate is hardly a 10/10 game, but it also isn't the worst thing ever despite being a rather unconventional Metroidvania. It was also originally a 3DS game, but it was ported to the Xbox 360 and PC with this HD release. It took me a little over 8 hours to 100% the game using an Xbox One controller on my PC on normal mode (you need to collect 100% of the collectibles to unlock the secret extra bit of the ending, which is boring and honestly not really worth it ^^;).
Mirror of Fate takes place after the original Lords of Shadow and explores the lives of Gabriel's descendants after he defeats the titular lords of shadow and becomes Dracula. His son, Trevor Belmont, and his grandson, Simon Belmont, (and even Alucard) all make appearances in their own acts of this three act game. It certainly has an interesting core concept in how it handles this reboot: turning Castlevania into a family drama instead of some amorphous centuries old battle of good vs. evil, but it's also very boringly done. None of the character writing, dialogue, or even the flavor text is all that interesting at all despite the game clearly thinking that it's VERY interesting. It's only really noteworthy in how much potential the idea has, but even then the execution is so lackluster that it doesn't really matter. The mechanics and design of the game are also flawed but interesting (but mostly flawed). While you CAN go back to older areas to use new abilities to hunt around for stuff, that really isn't the purpose of the game. Despite the fact that you CAN backtrack and there are some (fairly awkwardly placed) warp points, the game was clearly designed to be gone through one-way, so back tracking is quite slow and not very fun. This is also because the combat is like the combat in the proper Lords of Shadow game: it's like God of War. Enemies are way too spongey and take way too much punishment to kill, making combat a constant slog. Throw that in with just how little health you actually have, and combat is often quite frustrating rather than satisfying. The God of War spongey enemies simply don't work well in 2.5D compared to 3D. The multiple playable characters is neat but not all that remarkable. All three characters have those Kratos-glaive-like whips (super ridiculous range) as well as two magic states you can toggle on and off on top of two sub weapons. Each character has a magic state geared towards defense, and one geared towards offense, but it's not terribly interesting. If anything, Simon's power to just simply convert his mana bar into an extra health bar trains you badly at how you should handle fights, so then when you get to Alucard's chapter things are suddenly way harder now that you don't have that anymore. The sub weapons also have very infrequent ammo at the cost of being far more powerful per hit, but I found myself barley using them until the very end of the game, and even then that was just to clear through more tanky enemies. The fighting does work fine enough, and the bosses (especially Dracula) are usually pretty good fun, but for normal enemies the combat feels boring more often than it feels satisfying or fun. The platforming is also fine but nothing totally special. The graphics are fairly nice for what was once a 3DS game, but there are points where the visual style is too cluttered to obviously tell what is and isn't a platform, so I nearly fell into a pit once or twice because it had looked like the ground instead of like a pit. The jumping feels a bit floaty and weird, and the back-dash doesn't really feel like it goes back as far as it should, but those aren't unforgivable sins. The most annoying thing about the platforming is that about halfway into act 1 you get a hook shot sort of weapon that can grapple onto certain wall holds and ceiling tiles, but the range on that hook shot is entirely arbitrary to the particular grapple point. The grapple points tend to shine a certain way when you're close enough, but I found it often fiddly and weird, and the grapple points on walls weren't nearly well-distinguished enough from non-grapple wall holds, so there were a good few times I fell to my death (because bafflingly enough this game has fall damage) because I didn't realize I wasn't supposed to drop down instead of start rappelling off of the wall. The presentation is also pretty "meh" at the end of the day. The in-game models look quite nice, especially for what was once a 3DS game. I'm honestly kinda interested to see how nice it looks on an actual 3DS. But there are also cutscenes done in this cell-shaded comic book style that, while not how the actual gameplay models look, looks absolutely hideous. They really should've went for 3D stills that really look like a comic book, because seeing these cell-shaded character models move and especially talk in herky jerky awkward ways is far more often unintentionally hilarious than anything else XD. The music is also just atmospheric orchestral stuff whose only meaningful quality is that it's VERY forgettable. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. It's not an outright awful game, and I wouldn't even say it's the worst Metroid-like Castlevania game (I still say that's Circle of the Moon), but it's a pretty weak entry in a genre increasingly filled with more and more all-time greats. If you MUST play every Castlevania game in this style, like me, or somehow already own it, you probably won't hate your time with the game, but it's also just so sorta average I can't recommend anyone not into Castlevania seeking it out willingly (or paying more than a couple bucks for it). This is a Kickstarter-borne Metroidvania I heard a LOT about last year, and seemed to be right up my alley, but I didn't end up picking it up until the winter sale on Switch this year. I'm always one to take joy in playing a new Metroidvania, so I knew this was one I couldn't miss out on. I did nearly 100% of the collectibles and stuff in the game, and it took me a little under 15 hours to do so on the English version of the game.
Blasphemous is a game whose art style and setting are heavily inspired by European Medieval and Renaissance paintings and writings on the nature of hell, the afterlife, penance, and the day of reckoning. The game isn't explicitly Christian in a diegetic sense, but that's clearly where the inspiration comes from. The land of Custodia, and perhaps the entire world, have been ravaged (or blessed?) by a phenomenon called The Miracle for quite some time. They bring divine retribution and penance upon sinners and twist reality and pervert their bodies in order to have them serve out their due punishment. You play the role of The Penitent One, a warrior wielding a blade forged from guilt, whose own penance is to walk the world silently. You embark on a quest whose initial goals are quite unclear, but will ultimately carry you to meet with the biggest names around in the god-forsaken land of Custodia. The narrative of Blasphemous is, like its mechanics, very much inspired by Dark Souls. The natives of the world have odd, cryptic ways of speaking about things, and every item has a long description to give you little glimpses into the wider lore of the world you're questing in. You'll meet all nature of twisted and strange people along your quest, both friend and foe, whose motives you often only have the vaguest ideas of, but the Penitent One cares little of things that don't relate directly to advancing his quest. The game has a lot to say about the nature of penance and guilt in religious thought (and how it extends to everyday life), as well as just how much of that guilt and punishment is deserved, necessary, and actually even divine. While the effects of the Miracle are ever present in the world of Custodia, I often found it difficult to take every character at their word regarding how worthwhile their perverse punishments often were, and it makes for a very interesting and intriguing adventure. I really didn't get into the lore of the world very well, but just trying to navigate a world trying to eke out your own semblance of justice and judgment in a universe where divine punishment literally exists everywhere. The game has two endings, and I got them both (first the bad, then the good), and I think they also say interesting things about the nature of sacrifice (especially in the case of the player character). I found the sheer amounts of lore a bit overwhelming, but it's nice that they're tucked away behind a "Lore" button for each item, so you thankfully need not bother yourself with them if you don't want to. I don't really care for these kinds of "hands off" narratives like Soulsborne games tend to do, but I think this game does it pretty darn well. The mechanics of the game are very Dark Souls inspired, but thankfully a bit more forgiving than that. It's a 2D melee-focused Metroidvania not unlike something like Hollow Knight in how your character wields his sword. You have bonfires you can light and revive at, you have blood vials (estus flasks) which refill at these bonfires and you use to heal yourself when you're out fighting stuff, and you even leave a mark upon death. Thankfully, you don't lose any of your hard earned money (used for buying items and new moves) when you die. Instead, more like Demons Souls, you lose some of your max mana until you go back and retrieve the marker at the place of your death. You actually gain back a lot of health when you grab one too, and I even used them as mid-fight free heals in a couple of the harder boss fights XD The bosses are all really unique and cool (as are all the enemy designs), but I didn't find the game especially hard. There are about 10 or so bosses in the game, and only 3 of them even killed me once. Blasphemous doesn't have a level-up mechanic, but it does have tons of passive charms you can equip to boost your defense to certain elements or augment your abilities in some other way. Between that and finding more blood vials for more healing, powering up my blood vials for better healing, and finding new spells and max mana/health upgrades, I overall found that I didn't have much fear of dying even as I barely used the parry mechanic. I overall found the level of challenge very satisfying, and you could certainly make the game harder by trying to finish it with less loot, and if that isn't enough for you, you even unlock a harder mode (with more content) after you beat the game once~. The game is also a little bit of an unconventional Metroidvania. All of the mobility items you ultimately find are actually optional. Making hidden platforms appear never actually gates your path in any meaningful way, so unlike Hollow Knight where you gradually get more abilities to help you both traverse the world AND fight stuff, this game largely just has you powering up as you explore and fight things. Doing quests for NPCs and finding new items always involved some element of careful platforming and/or killing stuff, and the world is just so well designed that I always wanted to see more of it. This game is definitely focused more around its combat than its exploration, but that definitely isn't a bad thing. The art design is absolutely stellar. The pixel art is highly detailed and animated to really make the world come to life, especially on larger characters. Seeing all the grotesque things in the game brought to life so deftly really made me wanna uncover every possible path I could to see what cool thing could be behind it. The music is orchestral and slow, and very atmospheric. Not really anything I particularly remember or would wanna put on an MP3 player, but it's all very well done and lends to the game nicely. The game is also a pretty hard M-rating, having a fair bit of nudity and a LOT of blood and gore. Very well animated blood and gore, but blood and gore nonetheless. It's not quite the 2010 Splatterhouse reboot, but the occasional executions your character can do at times are particularly nasty, so I'd at least be ready for that going in. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is an absolutely excellent Metroidvania and a must play for fans of the genre. The combat feels great, the bosses are fun and challenging, and the world is beautifully crafted. It's not my favorite Metroidvania of all time (I'd personally rank it just below Iconoclasts), but it's still an excellent game and definitely one of the new greats of the genre. While Breath of Fire 2 was a game I had as a kid, the first game is something I'd never tried before. For this month's TR theme of Capcom/Konami games that aren't action games, I was thinking of playing the third game in the series, but I decided to finally get the first game under my belt first before going yet further into the series. It took me about 30-ish hours to beat the Japanese version of the game with the good ending on the Switch Online's Super Famicom service, and while I did use save states and rewinds, it was largely just for saving time to avoid needing to reclimb towers just because I thought an escape window was a door to another room XP
The game starts with the main character, Ryuu, being spoken words of prophecy in a dream only to wake up to his home being on fire and his village under attack by the Dark Dragon Army. His sister turns all the other villagers of the Light Dragon clan (including him) to stone in order to save them from the flames, and sacrifices herself to the commanding general of the Dark Dragon Army, Judas. Ryu, ever the silent protagonist, sets out at the wishes of his village's elders to avenge his sister's sacrifice and to save the world from the clutches of Dark Dragon Army and their emperor Zorgon. The story is overall very standard and nothing very impressive for 1993. I picked the Japanese version of the game after spending an hour or so with both that and the English version and finding that the Japanese version had more entertainingly written dialogue, but it's still very much "on an adventure to save the world" fare. The fairly large cast of 8 characters (including Ryu) don't have a ton of character between them, with most of the lines being split between Nina, Danku (Karn, in English) and Deis (Blue, in English). The most interesting thing in the story to me was how much of it I could see as early echoes of what would become Breath of Fire 2's much better done character arcs. Karn would be developed into Katt, Ox into Rand, and Gobi into Jean were the most obvious of those. BoF1's story is humorous and generally quite light, which doesn't make it bad, per se, but it does result in fairly unsatisfying set dressing for what ends up being a fairly long game. The mechanics are fairly simple, even for a JPRG of this era. Characters have normal attacks as well as spells, and that's just about it. Karn has some cool transformation spells he can learn from secret move tutors (they're what would influence the Shaman transformations in BoF2), and Ryu's dragon transformations work a bit differently than they do in the sequel, but there's really not a ton of variety here. BoF1 is quite an unambitious game narratively, and that extends to the mechanics of fighting as well. The combat itself isn't really well polished, either. The random encounter rate is far too high, and the only saving grace is that most combats can be fairly painlessly solved with just normal attacks, and you also have an auto-attack button you can set that to work with. The bosses aren't really all that powerful either. Especially if you go for the good ending and get Ryu's ultimate dragon form, even the final bosses of the game are pushovers, with the only really tough boss I faced being a big green fishy guy right before you get your dragon forms. Ryu's dragon forms are boss killing machines, but even more than that, it just seemed like my party was always very powerful compared to just about everything I was fighting. It makes the game drag on even more on top of the already fairly meh-writing, and that's before we even mention the poor signposting that plagues this game's pacing as well. The presentation in the game is quite nice, thankfully. A good portion of the music is pretty forgettable, but a lot of it is pretty darn good, especially the second main battle theme and several of the later town themes. The sprites are also very big and pretty. Breath of Fire 2 has a lot of really pretty big sprites in its isometric battle layouts, and that is something its predecessor doesn't slack on either. In a world where FFV was out but FFVI wasn't yet, BoF1's graphics still manage to hold their own on the SNES despite Capcom's relative unfamiliarity with the RPG genre. As far as differences between the English and Japanese versions of the game, there aren't really many of note, ultimately. While the character of the dialogue is more entertaining in Japanese, I don't think the actual content of the story is that meaningfully different (other than foreshadowing the final twist a bit more). There are some character name changes, of course, and the art direction of Karn's Japanese counterpart is a prettttty racist black stereotype (the grey skinned, big lipped clan of people whose proficiencies are stealing and disguise was proooobably a good thing to remove in localization ^^;), other than that, things are more or less the same. I saw some claims online of a couple of balance changes around how often enemies can inflict status effects, but I personally experienced none of that. At any rate, I wouldn't say the game particularly needs a retranslation to the degree that BoF2 certainly deserves. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. BoF1's biggest sins ultimately just mean its a bit boring. While I personally like it better than something like FFIV that I played last year, I think a lot of FFIV's faults are a result of the reckless ambition in which it was crafted. BoF1 is a very unambitious game, and that makes for a colorful yet not terribly memorable experience. It's not a bad game by any means, but even among the RPGs just on the SNES, many people will likely find it difficult to stay focused enough with to finish it. This is another game where I'm not even 100% sure where or how I heard about this thing, but I remember it being described as "Yu-Gi-Oh meets Monopoly with a Ganbare Goemon theme", and like any rational person, I knew I HAD to experience this thing XD. I got it on ebay for like $8 back when I lived in the States, but never got around to playing it. I held onto it though, and after having it with me for over another year and a half in Japan, I finally sat down and beat it XD. It took me about 8 hours to play through all 7 stages of the story mode.
The story of the game is typical wackiness for a Goemon game. These cursed cards are taking over the minds of gods and yokai and the Goemon crew have to go around defeating them to break the curses. Along the way you'll see a lot of familiar faces from previous Goemon games who even have some small voice clips to go with them, which add a little extra flavor to each opponent. You'll also see a really tasteless gay/trans joke or two, which while annoying and shitty is also definitely not out of character for this series. The story is very bare bones and does what it needs to in regards to giving the game a single-player mode. Mechanically, the game is more or less what I gave at the start: Yu-Gi-Oh, Goemon, and Monopoly. together at last(?). The basic gist of things is that you all start with a deck of 50 cards (Monsters called Mononoke, equipment, and spells) at the inn space on the board. You need to go around the board hitting each checkpoint before you can return to the inn for a big pile of free money. Along the way, there are special spaces like shops, caves that teleport you to another cave, and torii gates that heal status effects. There are also neutral spaces where you can summon monsters, and if the element (of which there are five) of the monster and space align, the monster gets a free level up. If you land on a monster that isn't yours, you have to fight it, and if you win the fight the attack points that overkilled the monster take away HP from your opponent's life points (very much like Yu-Gi-Oh). Monsters can be leveled up either at the end of your turn or by beating another monster, and to tilt the odds in your favor even more, you can play equipment cards during battle to beef up your monster's stats. That all sounds complicated, and it is for a video game board game, for sure, but that's about as simple as I can describe what took me like 3-ish hours of bumbling through the first few single-player stages to figure out XD The problem, however, is that past the cool concept, the board game itself isn't actually put together that well, nor does the game have all that much polish either. I could go on for ages about the problems the game has, but I'll try and make this as concise as I can: - The game has effectively 3 currencies: Money, Cards, and Life Points. These three currencies don't work together well enough, and you get SO much money from one, let alone two runs to the inn that money becomes worthless very quickly. - Money is only valuable in the early game, as monsters are cheap to summon, equipment is VERY expensive (good ones anyhow), and you lose money to whomever beats you in combat. Most games are decided in the first few turns, especially if one player gets unlucky enough for the other to get them into low or even negative money. If you have negative money, you've gotta start selling played monsters and cards in your hand, and there is basically no coming back from that. - Much like SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters Clash, the power creep of better cards is absurd, and unlike that game there is basically no reason to keep bad cards in your deck. You're here to stomp your enemy with powerful monsters with unfair abilities, and if you aren't trying to do that, you'll almost certainly lose. - While stronger/rarer monsters take more money to level up directly via turn actions, all monsters level identically through combat, whether rarity C or rarity A. That method is by stealing the levels of whatever they kill, so if a level 1 fresh monster kills a max-level 5 monster, that winner is now level 5. This means that strong monsters get SUPER strong and nearly unkill-able, making sure that comebacks are very rare. All this boils down to games feeling like you're SUPER at the mercy of the RNG of card draw (which is basically just one card a turn, as you need to land on a shop to use it instead of just passing by it) and whichever player has the better deck. The only reason I was able to beat most stages on my first or second try was because the AI is pretty dang bad and I also got very lucky (particularly on the last level). When it rains, it POURS in this game, and it makes for very unengaging matches past the first half-dozen turns or so. Whoever can make it back to the inn first is almost certainly going to win. Then on top of that, the game has absolutely inexcusable quality of life features. There is just no way to look around the board. You can zoom in and out from your current position, but unless you're in the middle of an action that involves picking a space or a monster (such as playing a spell card for removal, or picking the monster you want to fight at the end of the turn), you cannot look at the things on the board. You also can't bring up your cards to look at unless you're about to play one. Want to look at what equipment cards you have before you take a fork in the road that will land you on a monster or not? Tough luck. That is literally impossible. There are also no descriptions for what special spaces do in-game (I still have no idea what the boat spaces do), and there are also no indicators to where exactly caves spit you out before you land on them. The amount of information and convenience needlessly kept from the player is absurd down to the point where the game has no pause menu. If you wanna exit a match mid-game, you've gotta restart your console. There simply is no pause menu for such things mid-game. While you can at least see what the special ability and stats of a monster are mid-fight, that is cold comfort given the mountain of other bad UI decisions this game is filled with. The presentation is also fairly rough beyond the bad UI and insignificant/crappy writing. The boards are very detailed 2D sprites that your tiny 3D models walk around on. The boards are very pretty, yes, but the paths between spaces can often be obscured by that detail, and combined with the lack of a mini-map or the ability to look around the board at will, sometimes you'll go one way only to figure out it doesn't lead anywhere close to where you thought it did. The music is quite nice, but there aren't many tracks, most (if not all) of them are from past Goemon games, and they often don't fit the atmosphere of "board game" very well. The only really good thing I can say about the presentation is that the graphics overall look quite nice, especially the card art. Verdict: Not Recommended. I was pretty disappointed with this game. As I played more and more, it sunk in just how utterly broken so many of the basic building blocks of the card game were. Even at its best with some more polish, I think this game would be just okay, but with how bad the board game is on top of how rough the surrounding experience is, this game is impossible to recommend even if I didn't absolutely hate all my time with it. There are so many other board game games to play that are so much better than this, that even if needing to know Japanese to play it weren't an obstacle, there is just no real reason to go back and play this unless you're like me and simply NEED to witness this mechanical madness with your own eyes XD A little over 60 hours later, my 100th game beaten in 2020 comes to a close. Not to mention this is a game I've owned damn near since I beat Yakuza 2 like four years ago XD. This is one of a handful of games in the Yakuza series that have never come out in English, and given that this one takes place in the early 1600's, there's a lot of vocabulary that is period appropriate. That extra hard vocab kept me away from trying out this game for AGES, but this year I decided that it was finally time to push beyond the third Yakuza game, and I did it. As I mentioned before, it took me a little over 60 hours (although a decent amount of that is idled time, so I'd say probably more like 50-55 hours of actual playing) to do about 90-ish% of the content in the game on hard mode.
Kenzan is based very (and I mean VERY) loosely based on the real life person Miyamoto Musashi, who is a famous historical figure of Japan's warring states period famed for his mastery of fighting with two swords at once. The Kiryu of this story (named Kiryu Kazumanosuke, yes really X3) is the assumed name of Musashi after he's set up to take the fall for an assassination plot to kill one of Ieyasu's adult sons right before the battle at Sekigahara (the final battle that ended the warring states period and unified Japan). He is now living in Gion as a sort of loan shark (he collects money from people who couldn't pay before at the entertainment sorta-brothels), which is the red light district of Kyoto. Gion and the surrounding area play the role of Kamurocho as Kiryu tries to unravel the mystery behind why a girl with links to his past has suddenly showed up and asking him to kill a man. The story of the game is a HECK of a mixed bag. On a base level, there are a lot of characters effectively pulled from Yakuza 1 and/or 2 and put into a historical garb (like Kiryu's friend Itou), and then there are just plain inserts of classic Yakuza characters like Haruka and Majima. There are also a handful of pretty bad queer-phobic jokes on the worse side of humor, but on the better side of humor are the sort of ahistorical "part of history" stuff like Yakuza Zero has, like how Kiryu helps invent kabuki theater (which was invented around this time, yes, but with an all-female cast, so it makes no sense how Kiryu is allowed to be a part of it XD). That stuff is all more or less part and parcel for what I expected in this game. The overall narrative is a mess with an awful bow at the end. The game has some really interesting themes it brings up like "escaping being someone defined by violence" or "what it means to live with two identities", and they're introduced really well via the first five or so chapters that are effectively a "how did he get here?" series of connected flashbacks starting before Sekigahara and ending when Kiryu establishes himself at Gion. From there, you have that A plot of Haruka and Kiryu HORRIBLY sidetracked for what is effectively a third of the game as a B plot comes up whose main point seems to be to have Kiryu recreate the climax of Yakuza 2, right down to a 17th century stand in for Daigo Dojima. The ending especially has genuinely had me puzzling for days as to just why it's there, as it seems like they went out of their way to ruin any good messaging the game had. The game struggles with establishing stakes (everyone in the main cast just seems invincible) and keeping a consistent plot thread (that B plot sidelines stuff REALLY hard but pretends it isn't), but the ending is really what pushed me over the line from viewing the story as just unpolished to straight up not good. It's still got the fun, action movie quality of presentation that Yakuza is always good at, and it at least avoids tumbling head-over-ass into outright nationalist propaganda like something like Ghost of Tsushima does, but it's definitely a very weak follow up to Yakuza 2, and it's not difficult for me to see why people weren't exactly blown away by this game (reviewers derided it as "Yakuza 2.5", as it wasn't a "real" next-gen Yakuza yet) back when it came out. As far as the world design goes, it's pretty darn solid and has a really nice amount of content (as my 60 hour playtime should be self evident of). The side quests are good fun, and exploring around the content-rich surroundings of Gion are also Yakuza at its finest. I don't usually indulge in the hostess club and gambling stuff in Yakuza, and this game was no different. That stuff just doesn't interest me. The quests on the other hand have some neat spins to them, as there are 100 normal quests (my personal favorites of which were the ones involving helping a foreigner with very bad Japanese) and then there are 20 loan sharking quests and 20 bounties to collect as well. While it doesn't make a toooon of sense how Kiryu can both be a wanted man but also call the police to arrest people, the special conditions on some of them (like, "take them alive" (i.e. use only your fists)) do make them a bit more special, and it all begins to have more and more of that Yakuza-weirdness that the games start to lean into more and more after the first game. That said, there's also a cop who patrols around the streets outside of Gion, and if he sees you, you'll need to run away, and if he catches you, it's a REALLY hard fight you'll almost certainly lose. That cop is awful and it's a terrible mechanic they should feel bad about putting in the game XD. The combat is VERY much Yakuza 2 but with a new twists: swords! Now, of course there's the "Kiryu Kazuma has never killed anyone" jokes, and that's soooorta in play here. It is absolutely hilarious with the apparently non-lethal viciousness that some of your heat actions with the swords can pull off. You effectively have five fighting styles (unarmed, katana, short katana, big sword/club, and dual-swords) of which you can have 4 of equipped at a time. Getting a shiny new sword is always fun, and even though I found that normal katana (high offense) and dual-blades (a defensive stance, believe it or not) were my two favorites, getting new heat actions and messing around with the other weapons are always nice, and the combat is as reliably a fun time as it is in any other Yakuza game. The only thing I'm a little unsure of (at least I don't remember if it was so present in Yakuza 1 and 2) is how easy it felt it was to get knocked down and just really bullied by dudes charging up sword attacks. Part of that certainly may be down to playing on hard mode (which I still don't think is terribly difficult, but a more fun challenge than normal), but it was something minorly annoying for the encounters with loads of dudes to fight against. The presentation is pretty good but certainly hasn't aged well. This is a relatively early PS3 game having come out in 2008 (so it also has no trophies, which is weird to get used to), and while the main characters look quite nice, the contrast with the lower detailed models makes the game have quite an uncanny look to it at times during certain in-game cutscenes. There's also not a ton of music, and while the special tracks for certain fights and longer scenes are great, the normal battle music is something I really started to tune out pretty quickly. It's nothing special, but it's nothing great either, and while 1600's Kyoto does look pretty, it's not quite the hustle and bustle of 2000's Kamurocho. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Part of me does wanna not recommend this, but I really can't say that I didn't enjoy a majority of my time with this game. The story is very irritating in retrospect, especially the ending, but I enjoyed my time going through it, and I enjoyed the large amount of time just playing the game. That's why I put so much time into it. I understand most people reading this likely won't be in a position to play the game themselves unless it gets some kind of Kiwami-esque remake, but there are SO many other Yakuza games on the PS3 that you're really better off playing one of them. That said, if you DO feel the need (and have the ability) to play Yakuza Kenzan, it will likely be an underwhelming time, but it is certainly still an enjoyable game. This is an Ape Escape game released in 2006 only in Japan, and it's one that I've been after for years. This year wasn't the first time I'd become obsessed with Ape Escape to the point where I tried hunting down as much about it as I could, and the numerous Japan-only PS2 games have always intrigued me. Last month I was FINALLY able to find a copy of Million Monkeys at the resale mall in town for the whopping price of 500 yen, and I snapped it up on the spot. The game doesn't keep playtime, so I reckon I played it for about 25 hours to beat both campaigns on normal mode as well as beat the colosseum mode.
Million Monkeys is what you get when you cross Ape Escape, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, and EDF. The game opens on Japan just as a swarm of interstellar battleships start attacking the planet. Kakeru (aka "Spike" in English, the protagonist of the first Ape Escape game) and his friends are visiting Tokyo to witness the unveiling of a new virtual world system when it occurs, and they see giant gorilla mechs and drop-pods full of machinegun-toting monkeys fall from the battleships overhead. News reports show a helicopter shot of Specter surrounded by some very strange other monkeys on a platform of the ship over Tokyo, revealing to everyone just who's behind this. It just so happens that "everyone" also includes Specter himself! Lounging on an island retreat, some of the monkeys he's brought along with him drag him a TV screen to show him the news bulletin, and he storms off to find out just what's up with this fake Specter who's stolen both his authority and his entire army. That's right. Ape Escape pulls a Sonic Adventure 2 and lets you play as both the good guys AND the (kinda) bad guys XD. The actual story in the game past the intro is pretty light, but the stages are often prefaced with some sort of cutscene (especially in the second half) is all intermixed with a series of live action cutscenes in between some stages that show an English-language broadcast about the state of the war against the monkeys. It's genuinely like a news broadcast as well, with the newscaster speaking English while a Japanese voice dubs over her (but you can still understand her just fine). It occasionally cuts away to on-site reporting of the war in places from Russia to L.A. to Hamburg to right there in Tokyo, so those parts don't all have English, but just how odd and wacky these cutscenes are is surprisingly import-friendly to English speakers. The live-action stuff is easily one of my favorite things in the game, and as soon as I saw the front line report where the reporter has a banana bomb go off in her hand and cover her and the soldier next to her in bananas and banana peels, I knew this game was gold XD The gameplay is much more like EDF meets Ape Escape. You don't have any of the "catch X-many monkeys!" levels like the main-line AE games do, and instead you have 31 missions with specific capture targets. Though there ARE technically two campaigns to go through, this is largely a matter of what characters you can use in each. For Kakeru's Episode (as the game calls it), you can pick between the four good guys (Kakeru, Natsumi, the Professor, and even Charu, the green haired girl who gave you mission objectives in AE1). For Specter's Episode, you can pick between Specter and a monkey team. The game does have more characters than that, and the characters even have persistant stats outside of the story mode, but that's really it for the story stuff. There are a handful of CGI cutscenes that are different between the two campaigns, but only one mission out of the 31 is actually different between them. That said, the way each character plays and the weapons they get access to really does make each playthrough feel quite different. Everyone starts with the same-ish 5 weapons: a net, a melee item, dash boots, remote bombs, and a laser gun. If you're using one of your pre-built characters instead of one of the game-assigned ones, you will get parts at the end of each stage you beat. You can then combine these parts into new weapons, super moves, and cosmetic costumes and each character gets certain weapons in different orders or even weapons that only they can get (or weapons they never CAN get). Even their base equipment operates differently, with Specter's melee weapon being tonfa that hit way faster than Kakeru's bat, and Kakeru's laser gun having a faster rate of fire but less damage than Specter's. I was expecting the second playthrough I did to be a real slog, but it ended up being a really fun challenge to see how I could fare with these new (quite frankly often worse XP) weapons that Kakeru had. The stages are broken up into a concrete mission objective, and you usually need to fight your way to get there. Sometimes it's as simple as "beat a boss", or even some special puzzle stages in the middle of the game or an escort mission here and there, but mostly it's taking down a target. Sometimes that target is a series of monkeys (usually one group at the halfway point, and then another group at the end), and sometimes it's other enemies or even static objectives. They generally revolve around the same action gameplay of beating up the monkeys to break their armor and then catch them, but these monkeys and their non-monkey enemy allies are TOUGH. This is not a very easy game, even on normal mode. One of the biggest reasons my Specter playthrough was so much easier than my Kakeru one is that he gets the (very good) shotgun much earlier than Kakeru does, and he also has way better special moves. Getting used to how best you should jump, dash, conserve ammo, and try to get in melee attacks when you can is integral to surviving the later half of the game. The game also curiously doesn't record EVERY monkey you catch, with only a couple dozen specific ones being recorded. Each level has a score counter based on your monkey-catching combos (how many at once in a short period of time), mission completion time, bonus coins picked up in each stage, and health at the end of a mission. I never really felt compelled to go for high scores and you don't get anything for doing them, but it's neat that it's there. There's even a curious crossover with Sony's white cat Taro mascot, and he and his friends are hidden around many stages and you can pick them up on your radar. They're REALLY hard to find, but they're also recorded in the same place that the special monkeys you catch are (even though you only scan them, and not catch them). The problems the game really has are as equally ignorable as they are omnipresent. The comparison to a game like EDF (or even a Musou game) is very apt, in that if you don't like a silly presentation with tons of enemies to kill, you very well might find even the campy cutscenes not enough of a carrot to warrant dealing with the stick of the only mildly complex combat. The camera can be a bit finicky at times (even though buttons can now activate your weapons, you can still use the right stick to use them, so the camera is entirely operated via the shoulder buttons), but it isn't a huge problem. Aside from that, the game has some pretty significant difficulty curve issues as well as bad character balancing. Some characters like Specter or Pipotron G are WAY more powerful than others due to way more default special moves and better/earlier selections of items. This isn't necessarily a problem, especially for a game where multiplayer isn't the focus, but it's certainly a kind of issue worth mentioning. There isn't any level grinding in the game, and you really don't ever get much more powerful than you are. There are some side-grade chips you can make for items, but they rarely make you outright more powerful in a really significant way other than making your weapon recharge a bit faster/have more max ammo. This can make the difficulty curve issues way more of a bastard, as the hardest bosses in the game are at missions 15 and 16 (especially the Specter fight on mission 15), and the final boss is a pushover compared to them. The monkeys you have to fight get way harder as you go on, but even at the midpoint, feeling frustrated with how much better the game expects you to be can be an issue. This is also especially true if you're trying to get all the monkeys and not just rush through a stage, as these stages have no checkpoints and if you get a really unlucky combo you can lose a LOT of health really fast. It never gets nearly as bad as say, Drakengard 2, as you can rush through these stages if you were really so inclined, but it can still be a real pain in the butt to lose like 15-20 minutes of progress because the last gauntlet utterly destroyed you. The game also has a weird system of unlocking characters, as it was done entirely through entering codes you got on their website (back during the time of launch). Despite being a neat marketing gimmick back then, now it just makes it kinda odd that you get nothing at all for completing both campaigns and the arena battle mode, which is just several rounds of you fighting 3 NPCs all with similar powers. It's fun, but ultimately pretty ignorable. The only thing really cool worth mentioning about the colosseum mode is that it reveals the game this game is actually a successor to rather than Ape Escape 3. It's a successor to Ape Escape: Pumped and Primed. The game's presentation is a mixed bag. It has the aforementioned live action cutscenes, which are incredible and I love them, but the game also entirely lacks subtitles, as I guess Sony just hated deaf people during the first decade of the 2000's with how many of their first party-published games don't have them or have damn-near useless ones. The art style is a bit sharper and lower poly than the other AE PS2 games, and while it does look nice and clean, it was no doubt done to make the game run better (as even AE3 runs terrribly). While this game does get framerate dips, it's never anything horrible. The music is also pretty forgettable, and the game has a weirdly small selection of tracks. SO many missions have the exact same music it makes it feel like the game has like, a dozen total songs in it XD Verdict: Highly Recommended. Despite all my criticisms, I think this game's pluses heavily outweigh its minuses as far as my taste is concerned. The weird Red Alert-style cutscenes on top of the already really weird story and really solid gameplay make for a whole more than the sum of its parts. It isn't the most import-friendly game in the world (especially in regards to weapon and upgrade management), but it's also not the most impossible import in the world to fumble your way through if you don't know any Japanese at all. Either way, this is probably one of the best Japan-exclusive games I've ever played, and I'm so so happy that I was finally able to track this one down and play through it~. |
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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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