This was a game I saw in a mid-roll section of Game Center CX months ago and wrote down the name because it looked fun. It'd actually been so long since I'd written it down that I'd forgotten what it even was, but 400 yen made it a difficult deal to pass up when I finally came across it. Turns out it's a cute little action puzzle game put out by SNK in 1990 (known also as "Dexterity" in PAL territories but oddly enough never released in North America), and I was correct to write the name down! It took me about two hours over two play sessions to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware via my GameBoy Player.
Being a very early GameBoy action puzzle game, Funny Field doesn't really have a ton of story to speak of. You're a cute little boy out to save your cute little princess friend after she's been stolen by a ghost, and you've gotta flip these tiles to do it! Does it make a lot of sense? Of course not. But that doesn't matter. We're here to fight monsters and flip tiles, and the narrative conceit does exactly as much legwork as it needs to to further that goal x3 The gameplay is quite simple. It's 30 stages + one final boss fight and a smattering of bonus stages, where the principle gameplay is to flip over all the tiles in a stage from white to black. Flipping tiles also works on Othello rules, as if one black tile is flipped on one side and then you flip another (unobstructed) tile vertically or horizontally to it, all the tiles in between will also become flipped. But there are enemies hopping across each stage here to heck you up and will also cause mischief by flipping tiles themselves! Different enemies have different behaviors and priorities, from the snowmen out to murder you good to the ghosts who will flip a row one tile at a time until they run out of your stuff to mess up. One touch from these fellas and you're dead meat, so your one defense against them is to get them caught up in those series of tile flips between black tiles to weaken them, and then pick them up and ping them at a wall or another enemy. You've only got so much time to finish each stage, however, and as the clock gets closer to 0, the enemies enter a faster panic mode to make your job all that much difficult! This last point is really the only bit of the game I'm not a huge fan of, as it punishes you for getting unlucky with random enemy behavior or just taking a smidge too long. Enemies never walk on bridges, so on harder stages, it can be easier to just wait on a bridge for time to go up and lose a life to get more time rather than eat lives trying to salvage a desperate situation with fast moving and vengeful (not to mention respawning) enemies. It's a simple little game with three lives (though you can find more as well as other powerups by pushing boxes into corners in stages) and three continues, but it's hard enough that it'll likely take you a few tries to see it through to the end. The presentation is quite good for a GameBoy game of the era. The graphics are always clear and it's never a trouble to know what to do, and the enemy and character designs are cute and appealing as well. There're only a couple music tracks, but they're jaunty fun that fit the game really nicely. Verdict: Recommended. It's a little harder than I'd like it to be in some ways, but Funny Field is a really good little game. I'm not sure it's good enough to warrant an import for all but the staunchest of GameBoy fans, but if you don't mind emulation or can manage to find a copy cheap despite the shipping cost, this is a really fun way to spend a few hours.
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Prfsnl was going around in the Switch eShop sale a few days back giving recommendations for all of the games under $2. I still had a fair bit of eShop money that I received as a Christmas gift, so I looked into his recommendations, and this was one I ended up grabbing. A 2D metroidvania, even if short, is absolutely worth my time for $2! It took me about 50 minutes (short indeed!) to play through the English version of the game getting 94% completion.
The story for Trash Quest is practically non-existent. You're a raccoon with a jetpack and a blaster, and you've broken into some kind of sci-fi facility (spaceship?) to complete some kind of quest (likely for trash!). It does as much as it needs to and doesn't get in the way~. The gameplay of Trash Quest is a quite heavily platforming-focused metroidvania with a big emphasis on speedrunning. The short playtime seems geared around making it easier to keep track of successive playthroughs and how much better you've done compared to last time. There are a handful of bosses to fight and enemies to fight along your way, but managing your energy to get past the platforms is the real challenge most of the time. You don't have "jumps" so much as you have energy that your jetpack consumes when you use it, so doing a jump or using a moment of hover with it will consume a pip of energy and using jumps and hovers when you need them (as well as getting more max energy) is how you'll get past the game's many platforming and boss battle hurdles. The map is quite small, and you always go back to the start when you die, but the game's map is laid out in a radial fashion. Instead of unlocking new checkpoints you unlock new shortcuts. This means that even if you've died, you can use a shortcut to get back to where you were faster, and you'll get used to using those shortcuts, as you do not have much health and there are no health pickups. Getting hit with an enemy bullet hurts and knocks you back a bit, but hitting spikes makes you reset the room you're in. Thankfully, dying at a boss only puts you outside the boss's room, which is very kind of the game. The bosses are pretty darn good fun and the platforming is well put together too, but this is definitely a game for action platforming veterans, especially if you wanna do optional platforming challenges to get more health, damage, and fire rate. The presentation of the game is relatively simple pixel-art but with a lot of shadows. You're in a dark facility, so there's a light around you that illuminates the walls and platforms more as you get closer, and they get more dark and less detailed as you get farther away. This is actually a pretty clever platform helper as well as being a neat aesthetic choice, as what's illuminated by your light are details, while (mostly) only platforms are visible in the dark. This isn't a hard and fast rule, leading me to several surprises upon learning that marks on the wall were in fact not platforms and just decoration, but it's usually a safe way to go through the environment x3. The music is also really fun, and it makes for a really great fit to the high paced and fast platforming. Verdict: Recommended. It's a quite short game, but it's a very well polished one and was a really fun way to spend an hour! If you're not so into tougher platformers, you very well might have a bit more trouble enjoying this one, but if that's your thing, then this is definitely a metroidvania worth seeking out. After being so thoroughly disappointed with the previous Shining Force game, I thought I'd give a try to the sequel. I went in fully aware that the biggest problems I had with it were almost certainly not fixed, but I'd heard it was all around a fair bit better than the first game. And what I found... was a mixed bag to say the least ^^;. It took me around 25 hours to get through the English version of the game via the Genesis collection on PS3.
Shining Force 2 opens with the thief Slade stealing two crystals from a large tower in the kingdom of Granseal. It ends up causing a huge earthquake, unleashing a demon, and the demon possesses the king to the kingdom to the east and an invasion of Granseal begins. The king is momentarily defeated thanks to the efforts of the main character Bowie, but he manages to get away causing the citizens of Granseal to flee across the ocean to build a new kingdom until they can try and defeat this great demonic evil again. Overall the story is certainly trying to be a bit more in-depth and better written than the first game, but an overall significantly weaker localization hurts those efforts considerably. There are some neat character beats and twists, and some characters like Peter have some good (albeit perhaps not intentional) comedy to their character due to how awkward and direct everyone's speech is, but it comes off as a similarly generic story to the first game at the end of the day. On a macro level, all of the gameplay issues I had with the first game has are more or less still present. You still can't see enemy movement ranges, so it's too difficult to work out how far they can move, and it's still too hard to discern turn order with their strange RNG-filled initiative system, so making sound strategic decisions is far more difficult than it needs to be. A couple of things help ease this to be not quite as bad it was in the first game, particularly with how the game tends to be a tiny bit more easy than the first one, but even then I'd say this game's difficulty peaks are MUCH higher than the first (still tons of maps with very tough, very mobile flying enemies who will kick the crap out of you) even though the valleys are a bit lower and more numerous. A big reason for those valleys is down to just how many maps there are that are just "monsters attack you on the way to X-location". It's not exactly a sin to have story filler maps, but there's not really any meaningful story correlation to these maps and they're really just mandatory versions of the random encounters you can rarely run into while you trot around the world map. These random encounters are just repeats (or higher difficulty ones, depending on what point in the game you are) of those filler encounters. I get what they were going for here, but grinding already isn't very fun in a normal RPG where you have faster battles, and it's even less fun in a much slower strategy game like this. Even the world map itself is a really weird and not very fun design choice, as it makes it weirdly easy to just not know where you're supposed to go next (whether you just don't know or were only told once and won't be told again, much like Shining Wisdom would also have), which is a very strange problem to have in a strategy RPG. Encounter and map design overall is a pretty mixed bag, and overall feel a bit weaker than the first game had it. There are a good handful of gimmick maps which range from needlessly annoying (such as the few dark maps in caves, where it isn't fog of war, it's just that you can only see a small amount of the map via your cursor, so nothing is actually hidden, it's just hard to see) to absurdly hard out of nowhere (like the super hard and story-wise quite insignificant chess board map), and I found those to almost universally be the weakest and least fun maps in the game. Maps like the dark maps also gave me an appreciation for how many other strategy games have a strong "Blue Vs. Red" color scheme between allied and enemy units. There are no such color distinctions in Shining Force, and if you're scrolling around in a dark map or even in a normal map, it can be pretty easy to not even realize there's an enemy in the middle of your front line because they had their turn so long ago and they blend in with other units so well. As far as improvements to the first game go, the one that's easiest to point out is that the UI is far better streamlined and nowhere near as much of a pain to deal with. Menus could still use a bit more delay before confirmations, as it's really far to easy to select the wrong thing and be sorting through menus for ages (and it's also really frustrating that moving your unit, especially a magic user, to a spot still default the cursor to "end turn" instead of an attacking option), but overall it makes the general play a lot less painful than the first game had it. Another nice change from the first game is the enemy AI being nowhere near as likely to get stuck in a routine and simply never attack you. AI is far smarter and actually feels like its trying to kill you most of time, but even then you still have the common occasion of an enemy obviously picking the wrong attack to hit you with (like a caster pinging you for 1 damage instead of using a big AOE spell) or just standing there and getting beaten up for no reason. The presentation is once again very nice. It's a really pretty Genesis game, with very well detailed monster sprites and character portraits that are also very nice looking. The music is also quite good, so the presentation (aside from the poorer localization) is once again a more easy point in the favor of a Shining Force game. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Though I'd heard a fair bit about Shining Force 2 (and I went into it knowing I probably also wouldn't like it very much), I not only have a hard time recommending it but also don't really think it's all that much better than the first game. The first game's map design and difficulty balancing also had its problems, but I overall prefer it a fair deal to this game, especially with the better localization. If you liked Shining Force 1, you'll almost certainly also like this, but Shining Force 2 will in no way sway anyone who wasn't sold on the first game. While I did play my copy of Pokemon Blue a lot when I was younger (it helped me learn to read~), and I did eventually beat a copy of Pokemon Yellow that a friend gave me well over a decade ago, I've never beaten the original release of Gen 1 Pokemon (let alone the original original Japanese release). I've really wanted to eventually actually beat Pokemon Stadium 1 and/or 2 someday (or 2 and Gold & Silver, going by the Japanese titles), so I bought this copy of Pokemon Green to help facilitate getting my own team to use in the registrations. I honestly still don't even have Pokemon Stadium 1 nor do I have the transfer pak to be able to play GameBoy games with it, but I was just so in the mood for some retro Pokemon that I had to play this. It took me around 20 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware via my GameBoy Player (with my team of Venusaur, Pidgeot, Omastar, Sandslash, Hypno, and Jolteon).
It's the Pokemon story that started it all! You're a kid who starts in Pallet Town, you and your jerk neighbor are given Pokemon by Professor Oak, and you're sent off on your mission to become champion of the Pokemon League. Along the way you foil a few mafia plots and end up breaking up their organization as well as beating the pants off of your rival many times. It's a simple, cute story packed with lots of dialogue (honestly a shocking amount, for a GameBoy game) and NPCs to help flesh out its strange and wonderful world. It does exactly what it needs to, and it does a great job setting up the world so your Pokemon adventure can get on its way. My only main complaint is that signposting can be a bit rough at times. Granted there aren't THAT many places to even try going, ultimately, but if you haven't happened across the HM you need to get past an obstacle, it can be pretty frustrating just getting to where you're trying to go. It's a minor gripe since the game is pretty well laid out so even if you're completely lost it's hard to stay lost for that long, but it's certainly a significant possibility. The real meat here is the (by this point very familiar) Pokemon gameplay of building a Pokemon team and battling tons of trainers and wild Pokemon (all to catch and train and collect more Pokemon!). I pretty much expected the clunkiness of the earlier games to be an issue, and it for sure was in many regards. The sheer scale of Pokemon Green/Red (not to mention its sequel) is undoubtedly a technical marvel for the GameBoy. Regardless, the game's ambition definitely outpaced what was technically possible in it, and it leaves a lot of underdeveloped areas and room for improvement (as well as a lot of outright broken things). For just a brief list off of the top of my head: Your inventory (even your PC storage box) are way too small for how many items are in the game. Switching Pokemon boxes manually is an awful chore and can leave you suddenly without the space to catch a desired Pokemon with no warning to you. The AI cheats and isn't bound by the same rules you are (they have no PP to limit the amount of time they can use a move). Some moves (such as focus energy) outright don't work in the intended way. These are all things that aren't that big a deal, more often than not, and are more on the end of being the price of doing business with an old 8-bit RPG. Other stuff that's more difficult to look over are how there are just straight-up too many types in the game and not enough moves or Pokemon to actually make them all valuable. Many types (such as Ghost, Rock, and Bug) have some combination of lacking Pokemon exclusive to that type to use them or moves even of that type. This leads to balancing issues around Pokemon who therefore effectively have very few or no weakness (and is one of the main reasons why Psychic-type Pokemon are so horribly broken in this generation). Another thing that makes Psychic-types so broken is that not only are special and physical attacks still linked to type and not the individual move (so, for example, physical-focused water types are useless, as all water type moves scale based on the special stat, not physical attack), but special had not yet been split into special attack and special defense, so anything that's good at one is good at the other. None of these problems are game-breaking by any means. It all actually makes for an interesting challenge and comparison in how Pokemon Green/Red is played compared to later games, but with the benefit of hindsight in a larger design perspective, Pokemon's first generation likely would've benefited from a little restraint showed in just how many types there were. As they are, the game trend to be a bit hard and can necessitate a fair bit of grinding for new teammates if you run into a situation where you suddenly need to cover a new type you previously weren't (as EXP takes a fair while to grind up in this game), but that isn't uncommon at all for 8-bit RPGs (or even many 16-bit RPGs). The presentation is among the things that make this such an impressive GameBoy game. Tons of environments that are nice to look at and a good pile of nice music that's become so iconic for good reasons, but the thing most worth mentioning are the Pokemon themselves. Seeing the original Japanese generation 1 Pokemon designs was one of the most fun parts of this experience. It's very apparent that all of them were definitely not designed by the same person, and it's wild seeing ones that look almost like a 10-year old's drawing, some that are very weirdly overly cutesy in almost uncanny ways, and others that look nigh identical to the way that Pokemon is still drawn (sometimes all apart of the same Pokemon's evolution tree). There's tons of personality packed into each one, and even though the game's mechanics suffer a bit due to the sheer ambition of it all, it helps make up for that in just how much of that charm and personality is packed into the Pokemon themselves. Verdict: Recommended. For a GameBoy RPG, Pokemon still stands tall among its competition, and even though it wasn't even the first monster-catching and training RPG on the system, it's not hard to see why it took off where others didn't. The mechanics may be unrefined and the quality of life is incredibly lacking in some places, but Pokemon Green ended up being a surprisingly nice time considering the janky mess I was expecting after so many years of not playing it. I know "Pokemon is good" is hardly a hot take in 2021, but gen 1 really does hold up remarkably well after all these years and is definitely worth a (re-)visit if you still enjoy the modern series or just want some nice GameBoy RPG goodness to (re-)sink your teeth into~. Forgetting that I had ways to play other Genesis Shining games via my PS3 Genesis collection, I went out and found a couple Shining games on Saturn to play for this month's TR. Shining Wisdom was one of those games I found, and I was pretty excited to see that there was a Zelda-like action/adventure game in the series, as I'm a big fan of that style of game. AJ warned me it wasn't very good, but I've never been one to be terribly deterred by how bad a game might be. Hoo boy, was I in for a surprise XD. It took me about 10.5 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
The story follows you, the son of the dead dragon-slaying hero Jiles, as you're about to be inducted into the royal knights of the realm of Odegan. However, events unfold on your first day on the job that get you embroiled in the center of a plot by the evil Dark Elf to unseal the evil djinn and revive the great slumbering giant who rests beneath the kingdom and will destroy everything if he's woken up! The game was originally supposed to be a Genesis game, but it was bumped up late in development to be a Saturn game, so there really isn't all that much story. It does a fine job setting the stakes, but there just isn't really enough there to really get engaged with, and what is there I had a hard time getting all that interested in (they really like to flap their gums a lot about not much at all Xp). As a last note on the writing, it's also pretty rough at signposting, with many characters only telling you where to go next a single time, and then not repeating it upon speaking to them again. The gameplay though, that's where this game goes from mediocre to the worst game I have played all year. The list of things wrong with this game are long, but I'll start with the most important of them all to get right to the good stuff. This is a pretty typical top-down Zelda-like action/adventure game in that you have a life bar, sub-weapons, an overworld to explore, NPCs to talk to, dungeons to conquer, and bosses to fight. Most of the basic trappings will be very familiar to anyone who has even glimpsed at things like A Link to the Past (which itself predates this game by about four years). What is very not typical about it is how below your health bar you have a gauge with a series of numbers, and that is your running gauge. You need to mash the B button (or the X, Y, or Z buttons) to get up to running speed, and then you can hold the B button to keep that speed, but you'll slow down if you get hit (and the hit detection sucks, your sword's range is awful, and you just know that almost every enemy is far more mobile than you right from the start of the game). That running gauge is also your magic charge gauge, and casting a magic attack also means that your running goes to zero along with your magical charge. This all means that you are constantly, and I mean CONSTANTLY, mashing the B button for well over half the playtime of this game. It makes the game physically uncomfortable and even painful to play with how much you have to mash it. I honestly have no idea why they thought this was a good idea compared to just holding the button down to charge it or just having it auto charge and running just being automatic (walking is SO slow you'd never want to do it). It makes just playing the game a constant, painful chore, and the playing of the game (as we're about to get to) is not even a great time in the first place. I already mentioned that your sword's range is awful and hit detection is pretty spotty, but you have tons of sub weapons you can use as well (with many such as the "magic hand" clearly in some way being the inspiration for how games like Golden Sun would design environmental puzzles many years down the road). The main issue with this is that ALL of these weapons are bound to the C button. A handles consumable items, B is the eternal mashing button, and that leaves only C as the button to which everything else (jumping shoes, kicking shoes, sliding shoes, your sword, your magic hand, and much much more) all need to be constantly juggled between the C button. This is really annoying and takes a ton of time to do, and it also means that you're often totally defenseless when puzzle solving because you don't have your sword equipped. Because this was originally a Genesis game and was pushed to Saturn very late in development, those three buttons are all you really get (X/Y/Z only mirror B, and R and L only work in one menu), and it's another thing that makes the game a consistently annoying chore to play. The game's overall design is pretty rough as well. As mentioned before, signposting is pretty bad on the information level, but it's even worse on the map design level. Very often you'll be told to go to a location with only the barest (if any) indication of where that place is, leaving you to wander around the map until you happen to stumble into it. The game has no world map (such as A Link to the Past does), and the map in the manual is so vague that it's virtually useless, so you're on your own to bump and stumble into where the next area to go is. Dungeon design ranges from mediocre and threadbare to overly convoluted and filled with poorly signposted puzzles. The game has tons of puzzles where you need to use a magically charged version of one of your many items to progress, but exactly how you do it and with which one is up to you to trial and error your way through, and that's if there's any indication a puzzle exists at all (the goddess statue that only appears when the sand is stone is the worst offender here). Upon looking up the solution to a lot of them (after a ton of fruitless trial and error), it was often a logical solution, but how you'd think to even do that feels like something out of an point'n'click adventure game. The game also has a lot of items that are very easy to miss or out of the way to find (on the way to where you're *actually* going next), so it's also very easy to get caught up in trying every which'a'way to solve a puzzle not realizing that you don't even have the tools to do it. And this is all while you're being constantly assaulted by infinitely (and quickly) respawning enemies that are very annoying to kill. The only small mercy here is that the penalty for dying is only being sent back to the start of the dungeon you're in. You don't even lose any money, which is a nice silver lining I suppose. The game overall is very forgiving, with the ability to carry TONS of healing items and the bosses being (for better or worse) universally very easy, which is again a nice consolation with how annoying all of the normal enemies are. The presentation is a mixed bag. The environments are all 2D, but the character and enemy models are this sort of 3D-to-2D look that at times looks alright and at other times (such as on larger enemies and bosses) looks pretty rough. Character portraits when important characters are talking are well detailed and don't look bad, per se, but they often rarely look much at all like the character who they represent, even down to the skin color of the character being clearly different between the in-game model and the portrait. The music is all around pretty good. There are a few dungeons with fairly boring tracks, but overall the music is basically the only part of the game that gets a passing grade from me. Verdict: Not Recommended. As I said before, this is the worst game I've played all year. At first I was in doubt whether this game was REALLY worse than Maken Shao, but by the end of it I was absolutely positive. This is a game that is simply never fun to play, and is constantly putting obstacles in the way of you enjoying your time with it even a little. The music may be alright, but decent music alone does not a tolerable game make. That just means that you're not having your ears assaulted during the otherwise awful experience. Whether you're a fan of Zelda-style games or the Shining series in general, this is a game to completely avoid unless you deliberately want to give yourself a bad time. For this month's TR centered around Camelot-developed games, I had a few games to choose from, but I decided to go with the earliest one I had, the original Shining Force. Thankfully for me, it was recently released on the Switch Online Genesis service, so I played it there. It took me about 19.5 hours to play through the English version of the game with very limited save-state and rewind use (only used it a couple times when the fiddly UI made me end a turn when I hadn't meant to XP).
You play as Max, a knight in training in the tiny kingdom of Guardiana, whose life is suddenly thrown into disarray when the evil kingdom of Runefaust invades. Runefaust seeks to unleash the ancient Dark Dragon and destroy the world, but it's up to Max and his team, the titular Shining Force, to put a stop to the Runefaust's evil machinations. The story is pretty straightforward for a fantasy story of the time, but it's remarkable in just how excellently its translated for 1993. A colorful world full of silly characters and fun quips (from a talking space-hamster to a bunch of centaurs to an armadillo man in a steam-mech suit) make the world of Rune a very memorable one. The gameplay of Shining Force is a strategy RPG very much like Fire Emblem (a series also in its infancy at the time, as FE2 predates this game by only about a week), and reads very much like Sega's answer to Fire Emblem. Very much like Fire Emblem, you (effectively) have different classes of units composed to NPCs you recruit throughout the game, these units level up semi-randomly upon level-up, and they can equip weapons to make themselves stronger. Unlike Fire Emblem, Camelot decided to lean more into the RPG aspect of things rather than the strategy, having towns you can walk around and talk to NPCs in, mages that learn spells with levels rather than items, and simply buying items that have no durability, but there are also a lot of less than ideal consequences to that. But first, let's start with some good and welcome innovations (or at the very least things I like) compared to Fire Emblem. First of all, there is no perma-death in Shining Force. If an ally goes down, they can be resurrected for super cheap back in town if you get a game over (i.e. your main character is taken out) or win the battle. There are also virtually no consequences for getting a game over, as you just get sent back to the last church you saved at but keep all of the items and experience you gained in your last encounter. Being able to level grind like this is a really cool feature in a game with semi-random level-ups and lots of characters (many of whom are admittedly not worth using). You also don't recruit characters in battle, and recruitment is always done in towns by just talking to people. Even level-ups have a really nice feature in that they have a built-in stabilizer for just how many bad level-ups you can get. If you're stuck with a few bad levels in a row, you're much more likely for the next one to give you BIG bonuses to get you to where the game thinks you "should" be at that particularly level. These are all really nice features that make the game, on a surface level at least, a very welcoming and forgiving experience compared to the (certainly at the time) far more brutal SRPG of Fire Emblem. However, Camelot make a lot of baffling and (I would argue) bad choice in their further RPG-ifying of Fire Emblem's formula. First and foremost above all of them is how turn order is handled. The order each character goes in is determined by their respective speed stat combined with some hidden RNG, and this effectively means that you have no idea when a character's turn is coming. You can get an idea sometimes, if you're in a map with only a few enemies, but in larger maps, an enemy very well might get two turns and run forward to snipe your character before you had any meaningful chance to react. There are global turns limiting this (so they at least can't get like, three turns in a row), but with how hard many enemies hit and how hard the game can be at times, that's pretty cold comfort. This is made an even further problem by having no real way to tell how far an enemy can move, as while you can see their movement stats, you can't see how terrain affects it, so you can only hazard a guess at how safe you are from any given enemy. The game also lacks counterattacks of any kind (automatic or otherwise, at least so far as I experienced), so if you aren't getting in the first strike, you're getting the crap kicked out of you. And then on top of all THAT, the enemy AI is AWFUL, so it's a total crap shoot on if the enemy won't just stand there while you pummel their head in because something in their AI has bugged out so hard that they just don't know what to do. The end result of all of this is that it's very, VERY difficult to meaningfully strategize in this "Strategy RPG", and it can lead to a lot of annoying game overs with your most valuable units getting sniped (robbing you of the DPS necessary to beat the many auto-healing bosses). A lot of them wouldn't even be THAT big of a problem if there were just turns like Fire Emblem (and so many other SRPGs) use. Thankfully, the fact that the penalty for dying is so minute and how you can grind whenever you want means that these aren't game-breaking problems. They're still big problems, and they make a lot of maps feel more like RNG chores to slog through rather than strategic puzzles to solve, but they keep the game from descending from "annoyingly bothersome" to "unforgivably mean-spirited". Then on top of that there are some other problems that are more just things you can chalk up to the game's age and a lack of proper foresight in their design. Something that's sorta in between both of these spaces is how mages work. They level VERY slowly, and they have very low MP, so healing is a very limited resource compared to a lot of Fire Emblem games. It's not nearly as bad as Fire Emblem 1, where healers need to get attacked and survive to level up (because healing doesn't give them EXP), but it's still glacially slow compared to the rest of your party, and it makes those cheap shots earned by bad luck on the turn order feel that much worse and cheap. Magic is also incredibly dangerous almost the entire game, as there is no way to defend against it with stats. Until you get to higher HP values (which some characters simply never do), you're almost always one or two magic attacks away from being killed, no matter how high your defense stat may be. In one last move that I consider well-meaning but ultimately not very good, things such as double attacks, evasion, and critical hit chance are all linked to hidden, fixed values for each character and monster type, so you never know just how much danger you're going to be in (unlike a Fire Emblem where you generally have a speed or luck stat that determines when those things will happen). None of them are outright game breaking, sure, but it all contributes to that "this is a slog I need to get lucky to win at" feeling that plagues a lot of the game. The presentation is quite good. It's a Mega Drive game from 1992, and it's a damn nice looking one at that. Character portraits are pretty, as are the environments. The monster designs are also very cool, bringing that "fantasy meets ancient high technology" aesthetic that the Shining series is known for to full bore through very pretty attack animations. The music is also very good, and makes the slogging times much more bearable when they happen. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Given the two points that the localization is so good AND Fire Emblem wouldn't be localized for roughly a decade, it is not that surprising to me how Shining Force captured so many hearts and minds back in the day and continues to be a fondly remembered game now. But in 2021, I think the game has aged very roughly with just how poorly the strategy elements are executed. This is a game you'll likely find charming in its presentation and not utterly impossible in its difficulty, but if you're more used to more polished strategy game or SRPGs, then you're likely going to have a quite boring if not frustrating time seeing Shining Force through to the end. This was another game I've had my eye on for ages and only finally picked up in the recent eShop sale. I had very lukewarm feelings on the larger Bloodstained title, Ritual of the Night, and while that doesn't seem to be a very uncommon opinion, an even more common one is that Curse of the Moon (despite being a different genre) was easily the superior game between the two. Having played through nearly all of the classic Castlevanias last year, I was certainly interested (not to mention that it's also an IntiCreates game), and I'm glad that I finally got to playing through this one. It took me about three hours to play through the game the first time, and then another two hours to play through it again on Nightmare mode.
Curse of the Moon takes place in an alternate world to Ritual of the Night, where the samurai Zangetsu was placed under an evil curse long ago and he wanders the lands searching for the demon that put it on him in order to slay it. Along the way, you bump into other characters from Ritual of the Night, and you can have a quick chat with them to have them join you, or kill them to gain a special new power (or ignore them entirely). Like old Casltevanias, this game is very light on the story, but given that it's very specifically trying to be an old game like that, it hits that mark excellently. The story does exactly what it needs to to set up the action, and it provides a great spooky setting for the adventure taking place~. The gameplay of CotM is in the vein of the classic action Castlevanias rather than being a metroidvania like Ritual of the Night was (though it certainly doesn't help the confusion between the two with Curse of the Moon having a very similar title to Circle of the Moon, an actual metroidvania Castlevania game XP). You make your way through 9 stages to destroy the demon at the end of Zangetsu's quest, utilizing a basic attack as well as sub-weapons in a very Castlevania-y fashion. In another very Castlevnania-like move, you have multiple playable characters much like in Castlevania 3, but unlike in that game, you can swap between any of your four characters whenever if you have them (where in C3 Trevor Belmont can only bring along one friend at most). These other playable characters even have their own unique sub-weapons, special abilities to play very differently, and even their own respective healthbars, which all makes for much more varied experiences as well as allowing you to take a lot more punishment. However, if one character dies, they're *gone* until you either beat the stage or lose all of your playable characters, and your other characters don't heal up if one of them dies, leading to a big risk-reward element if you're using them as portable health bars. Nightmare Mode is a mode unlocked after beating the game once, and it has a different final stage instead of the original one (as well as making the bosses a bit harder). All of the stages are really well designed though, with the classic Castlevania knock-back being present but often not nearly so deadly as it once was. You can even pick between a Veteran or Casual mode at the start of any run, with the latter removing the limited number of extra lives as well as removing knock-back too (just to add one more layer of nice accessibility to the game). In general, the game is nowhere near as hard as the Castlevania of old, though. My only real complaint would be the boss battles, which while fun, often do require a bit too much trial and error for my liking with just how difficult it so often is to react to their attacks if you don't already know what's coming. They're great fun once you get the pattern down, but it's a pain to almost certainly get your head kicked in on your first attempt just because you don't know how to not die yet (unlike how generally forgiving and nice the rest of the enemy design is). At the very least the checkpoint placement for losing both party members and extra lives are very forgiving as well. The presentation is fantastic. Very much like a New Retro game like Shovel Knight, you have beautiful 8-bit-style sprites with modern day enhanced animations and (especially) backgrounds. It does a great job of capturing how you "remember" games looking, very much like a Shovel Knight does. The only thing that look obviously not 8-bit are the bosses, who have a level of detail much more obviously impossible on older machines. The music is also excellent, capturing the spooky-but-with-action Castlevania-y mood they're going for perfectly~. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is yet another absolutely brilliant game out of IntiCreates, and one that does an amazing job of capturing the feel and style of an older genre while bringing it forward to the modern era in very appreciated ways as well. If you're a fan of action games, especially if you liked old Castlevania but found it just a bit too hard a bit too often to be fun, then this is definitely one you shouldn't miss out on. This is a game I saw recommended on Twitter ages ago, but it was a bit too pricey at the time for me to take the plunge. Fast forward to a few weeks back during the Black Friday sale on the eShop, and it was down to the low low price of $2, which was more than good enough for me~. It took me like two hours to beat the English version on my Switch on a very sleepy morning where I accidentally woke up 3 hours early and couldn't fall back asleep XP.
Mechstermination Force takes place in a world very much like our own, but in the near future where giant MegaMechs have appeared from nowhere and taken over! You play a soldier in humanity's last pocket of resistance, trying to take back control one mech at a time! It's a very light story that is very, very silly. There isn't much story beyond that initial premise and the conversations you can have with other soldiers at base, and they have all sorts of silly quips and one-liners to toss around at you. It gave me a very Magicka-like vibe (to the point where it feels like it was made by the same people, and it actually does share some senior staff, I later discovered!), so if you liked that, then you'll probably like it here too. The gameplay is a series of boss fights in Contra-stlye run and gun action. The game has over a dozen bosses to fight, and you slowly get more powers to fight further on bosses with as the game progresses (climbing walls and a double jump), and you can also buy more max health and new weapons at the shop between missions. You get a big cash bonus for the first time you beat a boss, and you can replay old missions for bits of extra cash if you wanna grind some money to get a bit more max health or one more new weapon to try and overcome a more difficult challenge. You can switch between those weapons at any time mid-fight, so they come in VERY handy, and the ability to grind to get past difficult stuff is very appreciated. The game controls great and it's clear these folks really know their Contra, since these are some damn good Contra-like bosses. The presentation is very clean and quite pretty. The graphics have a crisp but very colorful look to them, very much like Magicka did (and given the two games share an art director, that isn't surprising), and the mech designs are great as well. The music is nothing super duper special, but like the story, it does the job of setting up the action and atmosphere just as much as it needs to, and doesn't overstay its welcome. Verdict: Recommended. This is a really solid game that's very well put together. The only real sticking point in recommending it is that, unless you're really into replaying bosses to get damage-less runs or better times (both of which the game does keep track of), you're likely going to have trouble getting value for money out of it if you don't get it on sale. Regardless, it's still a really well put together game, and I absolutely feel I got my money's worth. |
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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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