In my ongoing quest to clear through the remaining WiiWare games I’ve got on my Japanese Wii while I’ve still got it hooked up, this was the next thing on the list. This is a game I firmly recall hearing from many places was easily one of the best games on the WiiWare store regardless of region, and although it’s one I recall putting like half an hour into many years back, I didn’t remember much of my time with it. On top of all that, it’s also interestingly one of Grezzo’s first games, the studio made by the guy responsible for the Mana series, so this seemed like a fitting thing to play this year after all of the Mana games I’ve played earlier in the year (regardless of how much I didn’t enjoy them XD). It took me around 4.5 hours to play through the game to the credits on real hardware.
Our story follows our main character, who can either be a Mii of your choosing or the default in-game model named “Yuu.” On a quest to prove your worth as a warrior, you come to a land that is explicitly stated to be a world “like feudal Japan, but also like the more distant past as well as the future”. This very silly and irreverent attitude carries on throughout the game, and it follows you all the way through your quest as you’re quickly wrapped up in helping Princess Tomoe to squash a rebellion in the country (by a character whose name is literally the word for rebellion X3). It’s a story that’s exactly as serious as it means to be, which is to say not at all, and it’s delightful. A very funny and silly story that sets the stage for our ridiculous action very well, and I had a very fun time reading through it all~. That ridiculous action is stage-based and almost feels like a Wonderful 101 predecessor. You start with yourself and a buddy, that buddy lending you their weapon. You then go around the stage thwacking other baddies to get them into your increasingly long conga line of dudes, and any stronger ones with weapons can have their weapons borrowed just like you can from your main buddy. There are three weapon types, swords, hammers, and lances, and among the various types of them, they have different combos on top of each weapon type having its own line attack (which is activated by swinging the Wiimote). However, not all is so easy, as your enemies can thwack the guys following you and steal them right back! Thankfully for both you and them, though, the head of a line is only truly vulnerable when their line is completely destroyed, so you’ve gotta be getting thrashed to actually die. The much easier way to game over is by failing your present mission, which will usually be the result of the buddy you gotta protect dying. There are 40 stages between you and the credits, with more generic randomized missions filling the spaces between the story missions you hit at every multiple of five. During those randomized missions, you can recruit procedurally generated extra buddies as well as get accessories to bring into battle to power up your stats and line attacks. Your buddies even have personalities and will dislike some mission types and like others. Doing missions they like will get them bonus stats after battle, but doing too many ones they dislike can actually make them leave your group forever! Given that you can’t re-pick a buddy after you’ve done it, and you only see the mission types after you pick them, there may be times you need to pick a harder mission even to save the buddy you’ve got with you so you don’t risk losing them forever. On top of all of that, the procedurally generated non-story named bad guys you fight can even form rivalries with you, slowly getting stronger as you encounter them more and more. Eventually you can have “showdown” mission types appear, and if you win against them, that super powerful enemy will now be a buddy of yours! There are some slight drawbacks here and there. Some mission types are much harder than others, and given that your buddy is also your weapon, an unwise choice of buddy can make your next mission much harder if it turns out their weapon type is a bad match for the map you’re dumped into. There also aren’t too many maps in the game, with the same handful of 4 or 5 story maps being reused over and over with some slight variations in environmental objects. That said, it’s hard to see the lack of variety as much of a problem given how quick and breezy the missions are. There’s even a high score table in the game that keeps track of your highest rank reached, as though there are save points every 5 stages in the main story, you can keep going in the post-game and play as many of those non-story missions in a row as you possibly can for the highest score you can muster! All in all, it’s a really cool gameplay loop, and it’s super cool to have what’s basically an action rogue-lite (though we wouldn’t’ve called it that back then) on the Wii for such a cheap price digitally. The presentation of the game is very well done too. The music has some really fun and rockin’ tracks, with the boss themes being some of my particular favorites. The graphics are also simple but very clever in how well they get emotion out of the characters they’re using. Because Yuu, the main character, can also be a Mii, this means that basically everyone in the game is animating and emoting with Mii-like proportions, and it’s remarkable just how much variety they have in these despite the limited pieces they’re working with. The story characters are super fun and expressive, but the degree to which Grezzo makes the Mii-like characters emote makes it no surprise that Nintendo tapped them for projects like 3DS Streetpass games or the more recent Miitopia, as they’ve shown an incredible aptitude for it for quite some time. Verdict: Highly Recommended. While it takes a bit of getting used to the controls and the best practices in how to play, this is a super fun game! It absolutely deserves its reputation as one of the best games on WiiWare, as its gameplay loop expertly captures the most of what was possible with the relatively small file sizes you were restricted to for that system. If you’re a fan of action-based rogue-lites, this will certainly be a major pain in the butt to track down (let alone play if you don’t know Japanese ^^;) these days, but if you’re willing to go through the effort, you’ve got a super fun time waiting here for you~.
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I played the first Chocobo Dungeon nearly two years ago, and though I liked it, it didn’t really leave me hankering for more Mystery Dungeon stuff despite running out to pick this up in the midst of my playthrough of it x3. Now all this time later, the mood for more Mystery Dungeon has struck me at last, and I have finally seen this game through to the end. It took me a (surprisingly short) 12-ish hours to get through the Japanese version of the game playing on real hardware.
Chocobo Dungeon 2 picks up some time after the first game, and Mog and Chocobo have moved on from that village in search of new treasure. Coming across a strange dungeon, they venture inside only for Chocobo to get launched out while Mog is locked inside! Chocobo is found by a kind young white mage named Shiroma, who sees him go back into the dungeon, only to find Mog just as he’s causing the whole dungeon to blow up and sink into the ocean! This is just the beginning of the epic tale that will find Chocobo, Mog, and Shiroma in a grand quest to save the world! (or at least the local village). It’s a simple story, sure, but it’s a really nicely done one! Compared to how simple the writing in the first Chocobo Dungeon was, this game’s characters and setting really come to life in a way the series had just never done before, and the game benefits a ton from it. Never did I think a silly Chocobo-themed Mystery Dungeon game would get me to tear up, but here we are X3. It’s a very sweet story about the value in supporting and trusting in others, and its cool to see that it’s the legacy of these games being quite well written goes back this far! The gameplay is very much what you’d expect from a Mystery Dungeon game for anyone familiar with them. For those unfamiliar, in modern terms, we’d call them rogue-likes in the traditional sense, with you moving around a grid in a procedurally generated dungeon, and the enemies only move when you move. This game is a bit like the original Chocobo Dungeon, Chocobo Dungeon 2 is much less close to a “true” rogue-like than its predecessor was. CD2 is a HUGE step forward for the series away from the old style and towards the new in more than just its story. In earlier games, we had one big dungeon that would reset your level every time you left and came back (i.e. died), and you’d sometimes get to keep some armor and weapons, but just as often, you were back to square one when you died. Chocobo Dungeon 1 has a bit of permanent progression in how you can unlock little benefits via sidequests (which this game also has), but Chocobo Dungeon 2 moves that bar WAY forward in just how much bigger and more player-friendly the systems in this game are. First of all, we no longer have one big dungeon! Though you do effectively go through several dungeons twice, there are quite a few dungeons you’ll need to go through with each having its own boss to fight in Chocobo Dungeon 2. You also no longer lose your levels upon leaving the dungeon! All levels you get in Chocobo Dungeon 2 are permanent, and I ended up finishing the game around level 43 myself. On top of that, you can find spell tomes in dungeons to cast elemental magic with, and the more you cast a particular type of magic, the higher your reading comprehension level (and therefore magic) level gets as well! That said, stats aren’t everything in this game, and losing your stash of items (from your piles of tomes you’ve been hoarding to your preciously upgraded armor and weapon) can REALLY suck. However, while you do lose *everything* upon death in this game (where iirc Chocobo Dungeon 1 let you keep at least the armor and weapon you were wearing), you thankfully get to still keep a good chunk of your cash to restock once you get back to town. You can also easily use an easily bought item to teleport out of a dungeon in this game and, if you made it far enough, you can go through a tiny dungeon to get right back around where you left off. This makes supply runs a lot easier, even if these mini-dungeon shortcuts are things you have to do solo. Needing to do them solo is something special in this game as well, as this is also the first game to give you an NPC buddy following you around in each dungeon! The NPC party member you get can’t use items and will vary depending on the dungeon but having that extra bit of muscle can really be a life saver, and learning to utilize your partner’s power well is as crucial as learning to use your own. As an extra fun bonus, you can even dip into the options menu and have a buddy control that NPC instead of the CPU controlling them! Their AI is pretty darn good and reliable, honestly, but it’s still a super cool 2-player mode that you can use basically whenever you want~. All the new good stuff is nice and all, but this is still an early Mystery Dungeon game, and it does really show it. This game has some really mean bits and unpolished bits of design compared to later games like the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games many folks reading this are likely a lot more familiar with. It cannot be stressed enough just how awful a death usually is. While nothing you’ve found can truly never be found again, needing to find that stuff again, particularly your weapons & armor, can be a TON of work if they were highly upgraded. Not only can your weapons and armor (not to mention all of your precious piles of spell tomes and throwable magic rocks) disappear upon death, your weapons and armor have durability and can BREAK mid-battle if they take enough punishment. Your NPC ally’s stats scale off of your own level, but those weapons and armor are often the difference between life and death, and the village store selling literally no armor or weapons ever also makes it a real pain to go and find a fresh weapon and armor in your next venture into a dungeon in the early game. The lack of polish isn’t all bad, though. The reason I keep mentioning those precious spell tomes is because they’re a very valuable and, most importantly, very powerful way of dealing with enemies without putting your squishy birdy self in harm’s way. Going through the first few floors of a particularly tricky dungeon and hoarding all of the tomes you can is an excellent strategy for basically the entire game. While that on its own won’t take down every boss, of course, it’s a nice thing to have to get over particularly hard bits, even if it does feel a bit too overpowered at the end of the day. The aesthetics of the game are very pretty. Once we finally got bona fide 3D on consoles, we really stopped seeing many games use pre-rendered 3D graphics. Chocobo Dungeon 1 had pre-rendered 3D for its graphics, and its sequel really ups the ante in just how good they look. Monsters both friendly and otherwise look very pretty and cool in their chibi-styled designs and animations, and dungeons have very different flairs to them that make even re-going through a familiar location feel like a brand-new experience. The music is also excellent, and this is another title from this decade that shows off, yet again, why SquareSoft’s music team was and is still so heavily lauded in the industry. Verdict: Highly Recommended. The systems in this game aren’t perfect, but they’re a HUGE step forward from where they were even just one year earlier with the first game, and even if there are some still overly punishing things here and some weirdly overpowered things there, they all add up to a very fun experience that make even a game as old as this fun and approachable for players old and new alike. The graphics are great, the music is incredible, and if you’re a fan of rogue-likes (or even just if classic Final Fantasy creatures all cute & chibi sound like a good time), then this is absolutely one you don’t wanna pass up on. This, much like Celeste and To The Moon, is another narrative-focused indie game that I’ve had on my radar for AGES. Tons of people I knew loved it, and I really didn’t have any reason to think I wouldn’t love it too, but it was still a task of getting off my butt and actually playing it XD. In my recent binge on a bunch of PC games, however, I finally made it to playing it (yet another game I got for free on the Epic Game Store at some point). It was a lot of fun playing it alongside my wife (for whom is this a favorite) over the course of a couple days off we both had~. It took me 10~12 hours (I had a lot of idle time, so hard to be sure exactly) to play through the English version of the game while doing every side activity I could possibly find.
Night in the Woods is the story of Mae, a 20 year-old on her way home from university. She’s not sure university is actually for her, so she’s decided to come back to her home town for a bit to clear her head about things and hang out around old familiar faces, and there are a lot of old familiar faces to see! Her best friend Gregg and his boyfriend Angus, her friend Beatrice, her parents, and a whole community await her in the sleepy Appalachian town of Possum Springs. This is another game where I honestly hesitate to give much more plot summary than that (at the risk of making the game sound a bit boring), because so much of NitW’s appeal is just how well done the writing is and how well paced the story is. NitW is a story about individual issues, but about communities big and small too. It’s a story about how life just kind of sucks, that no matter how ready or unready you are, at any moment you can just get thrown a curve ball that throws everything into disarray, and you’re just expected to deal with that. From Mae herself to her friends to people she barely knows, NitW is very concerned with showing tons of different angles of how people deal with how things change, and especially how things just kinda keep getting worse. And why are things getting worse? Capitalism. I had no idea about it going in, but I was very delightfully surprised at just how fiercely anti-capitalist this game’s narrative is. It does an incredible job of painting a picture, from a single person up to the entirety of the town, of how our modern society simply does not care about those not immediately valuable to the almighty dollar, and will readily leave behind in the dirt those who cannot fend for themselves. This is a story with a lot going on and a lot of layers to dig through, and I’m sure people much smarter than me have already spilled tens of thousands of words on the larger and smaller themes of this game, and honestly it’s not hard to see why. It’s honestly hard to only write about the story this little myself XD. At any rate, I’d heard this game was written super well, and it absolutely lived up to the hype for me in that regard. The gameplay is a side-scrolling action/adventure game, but it’s far more on the adventure side of things. You go around town day to day, ending every day sleeping at your house, and you can platform around town as well as side activities with Mae’s super jumping powers. The general way you make days progress is by picking either Gregg or Beatrice to hang out with, but there are times that you need to engage in other things as well when the plot needs it. In the meanwhile, you can do all sorts of other activities with the denizens of Possum Springs if you take the time to get to know them. Walking past the same familiar faces and striking up conversations slowly helps bring Possum Springs to life for the player as Mae is filled in on the two-ish years of stuff that’s happened while she’s been gone. You don’t have to do most of that stuff, of course, but I’d certainly argue that exploring around town day to day is one of the most fun parts of the adventure, or at least it was for me~. While I honestly have no complaints anywhere about the writing, I have some very minor complaints with the gameplay design, and its largely in the more game-y parts of things. This is a game that loves dark environments, like in the dream sequences, and on both my monitors (but especially my main one) there were lots of times where I could genuinely not see anything beneath me and I was platforming in effective total darkness. That won’t be a problem for everyone, sure, but given that the game has no internal gamma adjustments and changing the brightness of either monitor did nothing, it made already kinda pointless-feeling platforming segments feel even more frustrating. Another thing to that point is the game’s insistence on a diegetic pause menu. Mae’s journal will fill up as she does various activities, and of course she can’t pull it out in her dreams or in a cutscene because that makes no sense. However, your options menu is reached via that journal, so if you’re trying to say, put the game back in windowed mode so you can drag it to your other monitor to make this dream sequence perhaps easier to see in, you’ll need to quit out of the game back to the main menu (resetting all your current progress in the area) to do it. Again, that’s a very me-issue, but it was enough of a problem that it’s hard to just completely pass it by here. The aesthetics of NitW are very pretty. The colorful shapes and styles that the world and characters are drawn with almost give the game the look of a picture book come to life. Characters are delightfully expressive in both gestures and facial expressions, and it was very easy to see how so many of my friends love the cast of this game so much. The music is also very good too. Whether it’s the music underscoring a dream sequence or the song played during one of your band practice mini-games, all the music is fantastic, and it underscores the action at hand beautifully. Verdict: Highly Recommended. While I may’ve had a couple small issues with how the game itself is designed, that didn’t stop me from enjoying the hell out of the final product. From its setting to its characters to its themes, this is a story that encapsulates so well so much of the struggle of the times we live in, and it does it masterfully. This is absolutely not a game you can afford to miss out on if you’re a fan of narrative-driven games. This is a game I've owned for over a decade now (I checked! XD), after buying it ages and ages ago after hearing it was great, but then just never getting around to playing it. However, my wife recently played through the latest entry in this wider series, as it so happens, and we decided it'd make a fun date night for her to watch me finally play through this first entry myself (and it was~ ^w^). It took me about 4-ish hours to play through the main game, and then the two post-game mini-episodes took about half an hour or so each. I played the game in English with an Xbone controller on my PC.
To The Moon is a story about Niel and Eva, two doctors who work for a company that specializes in helping near-death patients greatest wish come true. They go into the memories of the individual, and they basically give them new memories that result in fulfilling that greatest wish. This particular story, as the title suggests, involves fulfilling a dying man's wish to go to the moon. The two post-game mini-episodes are just little glimpses into the larger world that they live in, and the main game is where the really meaty storytelling lies. To The Moon may be just an RPG Maker game made in 2011 (and it sure looks like it too), but it's an incredibly well told and heartfelt story about grief, regret, and the complicated, flawed people that tragedy and trauma can nonetheless turn into people you'd never guess have a thing abnormal about them at all. This is the sort of game you could easily write an essay about the greater and smaller themes of, which I'm not going to do here, but I will conclude this section by saying that this game is a masterclass of drama in a limited medium. It accomplishes what it sets out to do spectacularly, and I'm honestly glad I waited this long to play it, because I don't think I would've had the perspective (or narrative analysis ability <w>) to really appreciate everything this game goes for had I played through it right when I bought it at age 17. Gameplay-wise, there's honestly not a ton to talk about. There are some *very* light puzzle mechanics here and there, and there's a joke battle relatively early on, but despite being an RPG Maker game, this is much more a straightforward adventure game than anything else. That's fine, and honestly the game uses its medium very well to give you just enough interactivity in what's going on to help you get that much more invested in the story, but this is much closer to a visual novel in actual content than it is to another notable RPG Maker game like Lisa: The Painful is. Aesthetically, this game obviously oozes the whole RPG Maker style if you even so much as glance at it, but it's a deceptively meticulously put together experience regardless. There are some nicely done CGs, the music is excellent (particularly the vocal track), and I found so many little subtleties in the original character designs that I just loved. How a character moves their hands, looks their eyes to the side, tons of little things that inform about the people these characters are with all the deft you used to see in old SquareSoft 16-bit games. It's all excellently done, and it compliments the storytelling beautifully. Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you're a fan of narrative-focused games, you've honestly probably at least already heard of this series, if you've not played it yourself already. Regardless, if this has somehow slipped your notice, you owe it to yourself to be like me and finally get off your butt and play it. Despite what the very RPG Maker graphics may suggest otherwise, this is an incredibly well told and constructed story, and easily one of the best bite-sized narrative experiences I've played. This is a game that’s been on my radar for a looooong time. I’m a big fan of precision platformers like this, having enjoyed a lot of games like Knytt and Super Meat Boy when I was younger, and it was really just a matter of having too much other stuff to get to that I already owned that was keeping me from getting to this (a game I knew I’d really enjoy). However, the Epic Game Store gave it away for free a while back, and it’s also a favorite of my wife’s. I was a bit burned out on RPGs after finishing SaGa 3, and my wife had the weekend free just like I did, so it seemed like an obvious choice to finally sit down and play through this while she could watch me~. It took me about 5.5 hours to beat the English version of the normal game (getting 149/175 strawberries and dying 661 times), and then I spent another 6 or 7 hours doing just about all the B-side levels, chapter 8, and as much of chapter 9 as I could manage (it’s very very tough <w> ).
Celeste is the story of Madeline, a woman who has taken it upon herself to journey out to the wilds of Canada to climb the titular Mount Celeste. It’s a strange and mystical place, and the climb is said to be incredibly treacherous, but she refuses to back down regardless. On her journey up, she encounters a strange old woman who lives on the mountain, a similarly strange spirit who haunts the deserted buildings, and a fellow climber named Theo. The actual beat-by-beat happenings of Celeste aren’t terribly interesting to list off (without getting into super spoiler-y territory), but it’s an incredibly well put together story, just as I’d heard it was. While the humor is a little dated in places (you will never forget that this game came out in 2017 XD), the story itself is as strong as ever. It’s a really well told story of self-discovery, self-doubt, and self-realization. Yes, there are a lot of indie games out there that are platformers that deal with significant themes of mental health, this is true. Nonetheless, Celeste stands out from the crowd as a truly impeccable example of just how great this type of game can be. The story is great, sure, but Celeste being a really tightly designed and well constructed platformer is also a significant feather in its cap. With very forgiving checkpoints and a well put together accessibility system with its Assist Mode options, platforming veterans and newbies are given the best chance they’ll have to get through the 7+ chapters of this game. Madeline has the ability to climb, wall jump, and normal jump, but she’ll gain (and lose) other abilities depending on the stage, and each of the game’s chapters does a really good job of using its particular focuses to make something that feels different from all the others. There is also a fair bit of optional content in each stage, and that’s where the strawberries and B-sides come in. There are also some special (and often quite difficult) puzzles to solve for special heart collectibles, and the cassette tapes you’ll find unlock harder “B-sides” of chapters that you can challenge as well (and even C-sides for the truly daring), but the more common strawberries are only there for bragging rights (as the game very openly states). Celeste is a very well put together precision platformer, yes, but I believe that its dedication to being accessible to all those who want to tackle the climb is a very meaningful part of its design that has led in no small part to just how popular it’s become over the years. The aesthetics of Celeste are also very well done. The music is excellent, and the pixel art graphics make each chapter come to life in unique and interesting ways that help add to their unique character just as much as their respective design focuses do. Another thing I loved a lot were the character portraits. There isn’t a *ton* of dialogue in Celeste, but just how expressive and numerous the faces that the characters get helps them all stand out and be memorable in their own ways so well that I couldn’t help but fall in love with it. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Honestly, if you’re the kind of person who knows me well enough to be reading this, you probably already know what Celeste is very well given what a popular game it is. Even still, if you like platforming and/or story-focused experiences, then this is absolutely not one to pass up. Celeste’s reputation as a stand-out excellent game is completely deserved, in my opinion, and it’s one absolutely worth checking out yourself too~. This is a game I’d heard great things about for years, but I’d never really put much priority on ever playing it. However, it recently went on sale for two bucks, so my wife picked it up to play through, and I figured what better time to pick it up and play through it myself than when I have her to talk about it with. It took me about 4 hours to play through the English version of the game.
Fire Watch is the story of a man named Henry who takes a job in one of Wyoming’s national parks doing exactly what the title of the game says: watching for fires. You follow his time there during the several months he’s assigned there, seeing the things he gets up to on the job as well as following his radio-enabled relationship with another of the fire watchers, Delilah. I hesitate to give more away than that, because a lot of Fire Watch’s story is really just going to hit better when experienced firsthand rather than being told about it. Though there is a slight degree of optional content to engage in, this is a game at the very least adjacent to the “walking simulator” genre, so the story is really what you’re here to see in the first place. And that story is done really well! The dialogue writing is excellent, with Henry and Delilah feeling so much like real people in the way they talk. The end result is a game that does a great job discussing guilt, regret, and the passing of time. Even though I don’t feel I relate to Henry on a direct level very closely at all (he’s just a very different person than me), the larger story beats were something I had no trouble seeing myself in at all. It’s a real shame that this dev team is probably never going to get a chance to actually make another game, because the way they execute the storytelling here is top notch, and as far as modern story-over-gameplay games I’ve played, this is easily near the top of the pile. The gameplay itself is, as I mentioned before, really nothing terribly special, as it’s basically all just walking places and pressing the button on stuff at the end of the day. You have general objectives to complete, sometimes they require a little bit of scavenger hunting via the map & compass you’re given to navigate, and there are some optional places to explore here and there, but this absolutely isn’t a game you’d go to because you heard the gameplay was stellar on its own without the story. I absolutely think that the gameplay does a good job of putting you in Henry’s shoes, at creating the correct atmosphere for the relevant story beat and all that, but this really is basically a walking sim at the end of the day, so don’t go in expecting some narrative-focused survival game or anything like that (not that I’m sure why you’d have that impression in the first place <w>). The presentation of the game is really well done. Just as the gameplay does, it compliments the narrative very nicely from the graphics to the sound design (not to mention the excellent voice acting. It’s so well done, it’s honestly hard to imagine the game looking much different while still having such an affective narrative. My only *slight* issue would be that, with the way the color palette of the game is done, it can be a bit hard to actually find your way through the forest sometimes. It’s an uncommon problem, sure, but it’s one I encountered often enough that it felt wrong to not mention it here. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a game that absolutely lived up to the hype. The normal price is a bit steep for a four hour game, I’ll admit, but if you can get past that (or get it on sale), this is an excellent narrative to spend an evening with. If you’re a fan of narrative-focused games, this is for sure not one you wanna pass up on, because you won’t be disappointed. (A very special thanks goes out to my friend Robin for buying the game for me when I was having payment processing issues on Steam, as I was like 7 cents short of affording the game on sale <w>) The last of the games that I played on my recent efforts to clear through some of my PC backlog, this is yet another game that I was curious about for ages, bought it on sale years and years back, and have only just finally gotten around to playing XD. I’m not usually one for FPS games, let lone one tied to Ubisoft, but the premise of this one had me so curious and the praise it received was so great that I just had to check it out. It took me about 5.5 hours to finish the game on normal mode.
Call of Juarez: Gunslinger follows Silas Greaves, an old cowboy just looking to stop into town and get a drink. Once he sits down at a table, he strikes up some conversation and the patrons quickly recognize his name as one of a famous gunslinger about which there are no shortage of unbelievable tales. Demanding stories straight from the source, Silas begins telling them stories of his younger days, and that is where you, the player, come in. Inspired by the way that Bastion’s narrator affected its gameplay, the narrative conceit of Gunslinger is that you are playing through the stories Silas is telling as he tells them, and revisions to the story or folks jumping in with their own details will change the game as you play it. It’s a super cool way to design a game, and they pull it off really well here. Being a game about the old west, there are certainly marks of the genre (especially regarding racism), but I think the game does a pretty darn good job of striking a balance between making the characters feel appropriate to the world they’re in while also incorporating many more modern ideas about the culture and stories of the old west. This is a game whose story is a love letter to old west fiction, and it has a lot of fun playing with the notion of storytelling and how the stories we tell affect our perceptions of both history and the present. It’s simultaneously a big, dumb cowboy story that features every famous and infamous cowboy who ever graced a Hollywood screen as well as a thoughtful contemplation on what these kinds of stories mean to us. It’s not the most deep dissection of those things, sure, but it does a great job at what it’s trying to do, and I loved every minute of it. The gameplay is pretty standard for an FPS of this time, but it has a few things here and there to make it special. On the more typical end, you can carry two guns at a time, you’re going through levels following objective markers and shooting enemies as they come, and you even have a bullet time mode you can activate once you’ve killed enough enemies. This definitely has the feelings of a budget title, in a sense, with how relatively few guns it has and how often locations are reused, but both of those aspects serve larger purposes. The guns are all relatively cowboy appropriate, for starters, and the reuse of locations is a bit more than meets the eye, and it’s honestly an aspect of the narrative device that I respected the most by the time I was done with it. On the more special end, you have little six-shooter inspired skill trees (which isn’t that unique, sure), as well as how the story changes depending on the flow of the narration as I mentioned earlier. The most unique part of the gameplay is how they’ve conceived boss fights in this game. In grand cowboy movie fashion, no matter how many unimportant enemies get taken down, a showdown against a bad guy almost always ends in a one-on-one showdown of reflexes. The way the game does this is with you seeing Silas’s hip holster and his hand as well as the enemy in front of you. Your goal here is to focus the reticle on the right hand side with your right stick (or mouse) on your enemy’s head to increase your zoom in for an easier shot, and you simultaneously use your left stick (or WASD on the keyboard) to keep Silas’s hand near his gun to increase the speed you draw your weapon at. The way you kill normal enemies already gets you points and EXP for both score and leveling up, and the better you do in these duels, the more EXP you’ll get for them. You get an extra big bonus if you win the duels honorably (by letting your enemy draw first), though it’s obviously a lot harder to do that. It’s a bit of a jank mechanic, but they do some really fun stuff with it and it helps the silly cowboy-ness of it all come alive that much more. My one main comment here is that these work WAY better with a controller, and I ended up being really glad that I still had my Xbone controller plugged in, because I’d play the normal game with my mouse and keyboard and then swap to the controller (which is a really nice, seamless transition) as soon as the duels started, because these control WAY more easily with joysticks than they do with the WASD keys and mouse. The aesthetics are really fun as well. The voice acting is really well done as is the sound design in general, with lots of fun, very cowboy-feeling music underscoring the action as it happens. The graphics also fit the game really well too. They’ve gone for a cell-shaded, vaguely realistic graphics style that gives the whole game a somewhat comic book feel without feeling like a comic book game. It lends itself really well to the hyper-reality of the action at hand, and it makes the whole thing that much more fun. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a really awesome game! I went in expecting to like it okay, and I came away loving it. If what I described about the storytelling intrigues you, or you’re someone who likes westerns and/or FPS games, this is absolutely not one you want to miss, because it’s a real treat on all levels (and I’m saying that as someone who’s never even seen a western movie <w>). I’m a big fan of metroidvanias, and this was one I hadn’t heard of, but a friend of mine is a big fan of. They happened to have a spare key for it lying around, and they very graciously gave it to me so I could play through it! Other than the bits of praise I heard from that friend, this was honestly a game I’d just never heard of. Judging from all the friends who jumped in call with me to watch me play it and how much they talked about loving it, it seems it’s certainly a popular one, and now that I’ve finished it myself, I can certainly see why! I played through the game three times. Once on normal mode and getting the good ending, which took about five hours. After that, I did a “Boss Mode” (this game’s version of the old Castlevania’s Julias Mode) playthrough that took about 2.5 hours, and then I finished it off with a hard mode playthrough to get the true good ending (which can only be gotten on hard mode after you’ve beaten the game once), and that was another 3.5 hours.
Lost Ruins is the story of an unnamed Heroine (who is simply called such throughout the game), who is summoned suddenly into some, well, mysterious and unfamiliar ruins. She has no memories of her life before being summoned, but judging from her clothes, she assumes she used to be some kind of school girl. A helpful witch quickly informs her that she is only the most recent to be summoned here, and that the evil Dark Lady is summoning all sorts of souls from other worlds to serve as sacrifices for a dark, ultimate ritual. With not a ton of help from her witch friend, our heroine sets off to take down the Dark Lady’s subjects and perhaps even get home in the end. The writing is nothing special, but it’s fine silly fun for what it is. The character writing is funny and weird in ways that make its small yet colorful cast charming in their own absurd ways, and that’s especially evident in the Boss Mode. It’s a lot less horny than you’d think a metroidvania about school girls would be, which was nice, though that’s not to say it’s not horny at all, of course XD. It’s at a perfectly tolerable level of it for me, and I found the writing fun for what it was and a good motivator for the adventure~ (clearly good enough to get me to go through it three times, at least XD). The gameplay of Lost Ruins is a 2D action/adventure metroidvania, so there’s going to be a lot of familiar elements for anyone even remotely familiar with the genre. However, there are a few interesting things that this game does that makes it stand out among the crowd of other high quality metroidvanias. First of all, this game has no mobility upgrades. There’s *some* recursive exploration, sure, but beyond going back to tackle trials or puzzles you just couldn’t beat the first time, the game is honestly fairly linear if you choose to play it that way, as the only thing keeping you from progressing are the bosses blocking your way and not the upgrades you might’ve otherwise gained from them. On that note, the game is actually very sparse on the upgrades full stop, really. You start with 20 HP and 20 MP, and by the end of the game your base stats will, at most, be 35 HP and 30 MP. The weapons, magic, and armor you find as well don’t really scale in power too much (though there certainly is *some* scaling to them), and you really end up playing through the whole game at a very similar durability to how you started it out as. You’ll find better weapons with different sorts of passives, you’ll find armor and trinkets that give different sorts of passives both defensive and offensive, and you’ll even get the ability to wear more pieces of armor/trinkets at once, but you don’t really play the game that differently at the end than you did at the start. This particular aspect of the game makes it particularly fun to replay, I think, as it’s both not terribly long *and* you’re not really getting much of a downgrade in your arsenal when you restart. As my hard mode playthrough that took 1.5 hours less than my original normal mode playthrough indicates, the skills and strategies you pick up from one playthrough carry over very easily to other playthroughs, and the different modes and little modifiers they give you make for some very fun challenge runs if you’re up to tackle them (such as Witch Mode, where you can’t use anything but magic spells the entire game). The aesthetics of the game are very pretty, and the pixel art is done very well. Both in the VN-style portraits for when the girls are talking as well as the animations on attacks, you can really tell a lot of time and effort went into bringing Lost Ruins’s cast to life. Several friends unfamiliar with the game actually thought I was playing a Momodora game, which is high praise in and of itself so far as I’m concerned. The music is also very fun and fits the mood of the game very well, and it all makes for a really good and fun time~. Verdict: Highly Recommended. As far as more action-focused metroidvanias go, this is a pretty damn good one! The story is fun, and the action and exploration is even better. Heck, the fact that I played through it so many times is in and of itself a testament to just how fun the game is to play. If you’re a fan of the genre, then Lost Ruins is definitely one you don’t wanna miss out on. While I had my Xbox controller out and the PC all ready to play games, I figured I may as well keep on chugging away at PC games that I've been meaning to play for ages. Eastward is a game my partner got me on Steam a good few months back, so it's been one I've been meaning to play for quite some time. I'd only ever heard good things about it, and though I wasn't *super* familiar with it, from what little I did know, it seemed right up my alley. It took me around 23 or so hours to beat the English version of the game while doing as many side quests and such as I can.
Eastward is the story of John, a miner living in the underground town of Potcrock Isle, who one day finds a little girl underground. Taking on the name Sam, this strange, white haired girl who he found in a strange yellow pod underground quickly becomes close to John, and they spend their days at the mines as John works out a meager living for the two of them. However, Sam's adventurous spirit combined with the turning hand of fate quickly make things difficult for the two of them, and they're forced to journey, as the title says, Eastward, for better or worse. Eastward was a game I absolutely bunched in with games like Undertale or Omori (two games, mind you, I haven't played) when it came out. It wears its inspirations on its sleeves, and the Mother/Earthbound series is very transparently one of them (to the point there's even a game-within-the-game called "Earth Born" that you can play). However, unlike many other Earthbound-inspired games, Eastward shares its genre with its other big inspiration, The Legend of Zelda, and with its other main inspirations very clearly being Japanese anime like Studio Ghibli films (as if the extremely obvious Hayao Miyazaki didn't make that clear enough), it certainly sets a quite high bar for itself both narratively and mechanically. Narratively, unquestionably so, I'd say it really lives up to the task it sets out for itself. Where something like the Mother series often uses a tale of growing up to communicate about the main themes of the respective title, Eastward uses being aged to do that. Honestly, I'd say the Studio Ghibli inspirations feel a lot stronger than the Mother/Earthbound inspirations in this regard, since the overall messaging and themes veer more towards contemplations on daily (especially family) life rather than the larger philosophical themes that Shigesato Itoi's works usually focus on. Eastward's main themes of responsibility and guardianship really impressed me. There's so much care and attention focused around the the different aspects of leadership and adult life (whether it's being the head of a settlement, a loving partner, or a parent to a child), it weaves a nuanced and heartfelt story masterfully. It's a story that's not afraid to get dark, but it's also a story that is never needlessly cruel or gratuitous, and that's something else I really appreciated it for. Eastward is easily one of the best written games I've ever played, and it's definitely one of my new favorite stories in media, hands down. While the narrative of Eastward may be more in the vein of a Studio Ghibli film, the gameplay is unquestionably more along the lines of The Legend of Zelda. It's a top-down 2D action/adventure game where you go through dungeons, solve puzzles, do sidequests, talk to townsfolk, all that good stuff. That said, given that this is a more linear game where backtracking to old areas is generally impossible, I suppose you could say it has more in common with games like Illusion of Gaia than Link to the Past. As a big fan of these types of action/adventure games, I found this to be a really fun one! The dungeon and boss design is really good, and the pacing of the story vs. action segments is also handled very well. There's a fair bit of side content to involve yourself with as well, and you very well might want to, because this is honestly a pretty tough game quite frequently. You can swap between John and Sam on the fly most of the time, and you can even split them up to operate them independently for puzzle solving. Sam has some attacks, but her main arsenal is a ranged stun move. John is your main pummeler and dispatcher of baddies, and his melee attack of a pan combined with the several guns you get over the course of the game will be how most bosses and such are fought. Rushing blindly forward into battle is often not the best course of action, however. John will step forward with each pan strike, which will usually stunlock most lone enemies, but it's not very helpful for fighting groups. Using Sam to stun enemies as well as dealing out your ammo (your guns all draw from the same pool) and bombs wisely is the key to surviving combats well, and the large enemy variety and well designed bosses make combat always something that's fun, even when it's hard. The game even has a very clearly Breath of the Wild-inspired cooking mechanic to top it all off, so you can always sure up your health bar with big healing items should you need to. On the whole, Eastward's mechanical design is just as well thought out as its narrative design, and that is to say: absolutely excellent. Aesthetically, Eastward is part of the modern trend of pixel-art indie games, but it's a *very* nice looking one of those. The music is fantastic and compliments each area and scene very nicely. The pixel art is also beautiful, and the enemy and especially NPC design is done so well that it brings each area to life in a way that feels different from the last. So many small touches and flourishes to each NPC, especially Sam, had be grinning ear to ear more times than I can count in just how well they add character and voice to a game with no voice acting. To that point, the localization in this game is REALLY well done. I honestly never would've guessed this game wasn't written originally in English with just how well done the dialogue writing is, and this Shanghai-based indie studio could frankly teach a lot of AAA publishers a thing or two with just how much care and attention can really bring a game to life in a new language. I'll finish this review off with talking about the game-within-a-game, Earth Born. Rather than being some tacked on little mini-game, Earth Born is a properly fleshed out little game (as well as a not super subtle framing device for the rest of the game), and a really competently put together little rogue-lite RPG. *This* is where the Earthbound-inspired mechanical design is, and you, the knight, have 7 days to train up, get equipped, and assemble a party before the demon lord's ritual is complete. It's a pretty involved little game, and you could easily spend a ton of time learning its ins and outs and optimizing routes if you were so inclined. You can also get little in-game amiibo-type things in Eastward to use as extra items in Earth Born if things get too tough (and I know I needed them), but you thankfully never actually *have* to play Earth Born for any real period of time. I played it once and got lucky enough to get the normal ending in it (but good gods was it close), and that single full playthrough took me almost an hour! With how good Eastward already is, Earth Born is just icing on the cake and one more thing to get invested in if you're so inclined~. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is the 3rd year in a row that I've ended up playing something very early in the year that becomes an all-time favorite game. Two years ago it was Dandy Dungeon, last year it was Disco Elysium, and this year it's Eastward. Eastward is a master craft of storytelling and an excellently put together action/adventure games that's absolutely deserving of standing tall amongst its inspirations. Not many dev teams could've put together something that works this well, but these folks have managed it, and I'm super excited for whatever it is they put out next. If a bit of difficulty doesn't turn you off to it, this is one you definitely don't wanna miss out on if you're at all into quality story telling in games or 2D Zelda-likes because it's one of the best non-rogue-like indie games out there right now, as far as I'm concerned. Continuing on with the Super Famicom's Quintet trilogy, this was the obvious next choice to play after Soul Blazer. Now this is a game I actually have played some of before, but I only got like a third of the way in and it was a LONG time ago. I'd also heard a lot of things over the years about how much worse the English version was vs. the original Japanese one (in a very standard mood for an Enix-published title), so I was very interested to see what the original version was like. It took me about 12 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware without abusing save states.
Illusion of Gaia is the story of Temu, a young boy who lives in a coastal town and spends all day hanging out with his buddies. He's always had strange, telekinetic powers, but he's a kid like any other, and as soon as he's able, he's vowed to go out and find his father who disappeared a year ago when he left town to search for the Tower of Babel. After the kingdom's princess flees to his town and hides in his house, he and her become fast friends, and before they know it, the king has imprisoned Temu and they've all started onto a grand adventure to save the world. In grand Enix fashion, I've heard many times over the years that this is a really poorly translated game in its English release. I've heard it described as outright nonsensical, even. The Japanese version, on the other hand, is actually a surprisingly really well written story. It's a really thoughtfully written tale about growing up, and I really loved how it tackled themes of discrimination (and while not perfect about it, it's a lot better than even a lot of games now get these sorts of things, frankly). Illusion of Gaia is a story very concerned about life, death, and just what you spend the one life you have doing. Life is never a completely pretty thing, and good people do bad things all the time for all sorts of reasons. What sort of life you lead and what you get from it, as well as what you do to others, is what paints this grand tapestry we call life. It's got some similar execution problems to Soul Blazer in how it doesn't always use music as well as it could to set certain scenes, but the story was nonetheless a really excellent one, and it's easily one of my new favorites on the console. It's just a shame it's nowhere remotely as good in the English release ^^; The gameplay is once again a sort of Zelda-like, but with generally stiffer feeling combat as well as a transformation gimmick. Temu can turn into the dark warrior Freedan at save points in dungeons (and even another transformation much later into the game), and the respective powers of the different transformations are used to solve puzzles in dungeons. The boss and puzzle design isn't quite up to par with something like Link to the Past or other 2D Zelda games, but it still makes for a quite fun action game even if the adventure parts are more centered around the story writing than the exploration in towns and dungeons. Speaking of which, there are significantly more towns in this game than in the last one, but they're largely for painting scenery and for telling the story. This is still a game with no money system, and you also don't level up with EXP like you did in Soul Blazer. Instead, clearing all of the monsters in a room gets you an upgrade to your max health, your attack power, or your defense power, so there's a hard limit to how great your stats can get in this game. There being no money also means that there's a hard limit to how many healing items you can get, and I've heard many a tale of how important it is to save your healing herbs in the English version to be able to deal with the harder bosses (which are MUCH harder in that version than in this one). The Japanese version, at least, had quite a nice difficulty curve to it, and while it's a bit harder than Soul Blazer and has no option to grind for power (though you can grind for extra lives, for whatever that's worth), this version should be eminently completable, especially for people familiar with the genre. The presentation here is once again very good. The graphics are very pretty, and each location looks very distinct. NPCs and monsters are also very expressive and cool looking respectively, and the UI on top of the screen that shows monster and boss health is super appreciated for a game like this. While the UI design may've moved on from just copying Actraiser, the quality of the music is thankfully still just as strong as ever, and Illusion of Gaia has a soundtrack very befitting of its legacy. Verdict: Highly Recommended. At least for the Japanese version, this is a game I can't recommend enough. It's a real shame that the English version is so much poorer, because it's honestly one of the strongest games on the system when it's actually written the way it's supposed to be. The action may not be the strongest on the system, but the story more than makes up for that (despite the imperfections and casual racism ^^; ), and this is absolutely a game worth checking out for action/adventure and 2D Zelda fans. |
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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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