The idea I've got for this page kind of goes like this: I try a lot of games, but I put a lot of games down very quickly. I do not want to commit to a full LP for every single thing I'll pick up for an hour or two. Sometimes I just want to have a record of what I've been looking at, and maybe upgrade a project to an LP if I'm enjoying it.

General game log

2025-05-16

I've been trying some pokémon clones. Nuumon and Dokimon Quest didn't seem all that great. I probably need to give Dokimon more of a fair shake since I saw them talking about a war against the Dokimon and shut it off then and there, but I didn't really jive with them. Maybe I would've been a bit more generous to them if the dev's website were a bit better but their about me page was a résumé and that really rubbed me the wrong way.

I booted up Monster Complete World to find out what's going on there. My Japanese is awful so I'm not 100% clear on what's going on in it, but it seems like it's kind of a pastiche of everything that was happening in monster games in 1999. You've got random dungeons you make by putting other CDs in the tray, mystery dungeons, catching monsters, maybe breeding monsters. I think you can train monsters at the gym? There's a lot going on with it, but I can't read it well enough and it didn't seem all that great with its semi mystery dungeon type deal. It's interesting though.

Nexomon takes two seconds to open the menu and that's too long. Everything about it feels like a mobile game, because it started life as one. It seems pretty stripped-down compared to Pokemon and not in a way I like. It's a little bit better than Nuumon but the attention to detail seems pretty slapdash. They mix high-res vector art with sprite work on the map and the moves are at the opposite end of the screen from the move descriptions in battle. I don't like it.

Disc Creatures is better than those other ones. It feels like I'm playing a kind of middling GameBoy RPG. There's a half second pause whenever I click to show the full text in a text box and that drives me up the wall. I don't like the way the menus are laid out. It takes a few too many clicks to make any changes. It didn't really grab me but it's playable.

Anode Heart is more of a Digimon clone than a Pokémon clone and it's the best one of the bunch. Something about the movement feels a little bit off on a controller but it's solid enough on the whole. I would have a pretty good time playing more of it.

I booted up Death end Re;Quest 2 and immediately got why it resonates so much with a subset of internet peeps I interact with. It is laser-targeted at a subset of people in bad living situations who only have friends online.

I played about ten hours of Look Outside. It's developed by a few Barkley: Shut up and Jam Gaiden veterans and you can really feel it. Most of the time it's leaning into the more horrific direction they were starting to explore in Barkley 2, but every now and then you can see some glimmers of their sense of humor shining through, like when you put on the crown of the rat king and start talking to rats and it's all joke's, or when you get to the basement and find the guy's room with a bunch of anime wallscrolls and shurikens, or when you get the angelic Fred to drop the bit. The Barkley team continue to be the best JRPG developers in America.

I booted up Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy and got about three days in. I think I hate most of the cast. I hear it's really good though, so I'll probably get back to it at some point. It's fairly charming.

I played a bit of Ni no Kuni in Japanese since I read it was basically the easiest thing to read, and it is. I can understand pretty much all of it if I take my time with a dictionary, though Shizuku talks a bit too fast in the cutscenes. I really feel like I need to drill vocabulary and start working a bit more on grammar and parts of speech.

2025-04-26

I've hit credits on Pokemon Shield now. I don't know that I have much more to say about it than I did the other day. It's kind of trapped between two different approaches and with all the old Pokemon in the Wild Area being as strong as they are it's hard for the Galar mons to carve out a unique identity of their own. It can't seem to decide if it wants to commit to visible Pokemon or random encounters, open-world exploration or linear guided storytelling and it arrives at a compromise point that doesn't fully commit to one or the other. However, with the DLC you can start to see them experimenting with the approach they'd take in Scarlet and Violet. The Crown Tundra has a few different quests going on concurrently and you can pick and choose which one of the three you want to pursue. It's a bit more open-ended and it bears a bit more resemblance to the sort of approach they'd take in the next game.

I've started playing Tokyo Clanpool after seeing it in the Compile Heart alarm clock app. I'm an hour in and I haven't seen why it was denied from both the Switch eShop and Steam yet. I'm morbidly excited to find out why.

Alright I've put a few more hours into Tokyo Clanpool now. I still have no idea why it's been rejected from Steam and the eShop. It seems like a pretty solid dungeon crawler with a grab-bag of mechanics from other RPGs. You've got your wall destruction skills from Labyrinth of Refrain, hover skills from Class of Heroes, a stripped-down kind of demon fusion in the vein of SMT, half of the systems from Disgaea's Dark Assembly, and something resembling SMT's magnetite for overworld skills. It's pretty good! I'm not sure if I'd recommend it yet but it's way better than I was expecting. It's not hard, which one of the three reviewers said was a negative but it is extremely funny to one-round a boss. Another of the reviewers said the combat was too slow so I can only assume they didn't see the speed toggle button in the top of the screen. I'll probably continue on with it, find out what the last mechanic I haven't seen yet is. It's kind of a shame it's stuck on GoG because I really want to see how Compile Heart iterates on this.

2025-04-22

I've hit credits on Pokémon Sun. It's a little bit better-paced than USUM, if for no other reason than because the fairy captain doesn't grind the story to a halt at the last minute.

I've been trying to engage with all the mechanics and find all the new pokémon, and I think the Poké-Pelago and Pokémon Refresh are a bit of a step down from Pokemon-Amie and Super Training and the Dexnav. They all just take way longer to do anything and there's not really a good way to tell if there's any rare pokemon in an area so it all just feels more empty, mechanically.

This is compounded with how many of the new pokémon are these 5% spawn rates that only appear in one fishing spot or patch of grass. This would be cool if they had built on the Dexnav and had some way of influencing the rates, but instead it's just like, maybe you talk to one of the NPCs in a Pokemon Center and maybe they'll tell you about it, or maybe they won't. Good luck finding Mareanie, it appears in two places at a 5% rate and a 1% rate. But not, like, as a regular encounter. That's just the encounter rate for Corsola, who you have to stall out and get to low HP to get it to do an SOS call to bring in another pokémon, which is usually another Corsola but has a small chance (I saw like 20 corsola before a Mareanie so i'll call it 5%) of being Mareanie. Also good luck finding Dhelmise. It appears in the one fishing spot in the last town at a 1% rate. Those are the most egregious ones, but basically every new halfway decent pokémon is like this. It's pretty tedious and would be helped if there were something more like the Dexnav to let you keep track of what's in an area without just going straight to Bulbapedia.
The story seems fine, though I think the people I've seen online really overstate how drastic the changes between SuMo and USUM are.

Continuing on the Pokémon train, I'm a few gyms deep into Pokémon Shield now. I think it's kind of stuck in an awkward position where it's not sure which parts of the old approach to keep and which to ditch as it tries to keep the linear structure and some of the things with random encounters intact while also giving you access to a wide variety of pokémon earlier.

One of the big issues with gens 1-7 is that there's not really a whole lot of variety in the pokémon you can get early on. There's the regional rat, the regional bird, the regional bug, and it doesn't really open up too much until the midgame. The Wild Area lets them give you a wider variety of types and a bigger spread of pokémon so that people's teams can start looking different earlier. But they don't want you having pokémon be too good that early so they had to impose stricter restrictions with the badges. It's kind of an interesting approach. You can go explore the Wild Area and maybe find some pokémon you can catch, or you can stick to the routes and be guaranteed to find pokémon that you can catch. Or you can just go to the Dynamax Dens and get the strongest pokémon you can catch with no effort at all.

They seem to still be trying to work out how they want to approach a system where you can make your pokémon stronger one time during the fight, but in a way that lets them not have to redesign new forms for a thousand pokémon. Dynamax isn't quite there yet, because it still has the issue of making the rich get richer, instead of creating a niche for the poorer mons to thrive.

They're trying to figure out what they can do to evolve the series while keeping the core intact, and they have to do that while still maintaining their appeal with all the different audiences Pokémon is meant to appeal to, with just the one set of battle mechanics and base stats. It's a really daunting, tough problem to solve and I don't envy them there. With their recent moves it seems like maybe their thought process now is that the competitive players can have their own game, and the people who want a JRPG can have the Legends games, and then there's Pokémon Home for the collectors, and then maybe the mainline games are just meant to be the entry point to help kids figure out which direction they want to focus in on if they want more Pokémon.

2025-04-16

I'm continuing to look into Compile Heart's catalog, so I picked up Cross Edge off eBay. I thought the angle I'd be approaching it from would be like "alright youtube we've gotta ask, what is The Worst JRPG on PS3, let's crack on with it", and after an hour with it I was pretty prepared to rip into it, but after sleeping on it I think a more interesting angle of attack is to look at it as the starting point for how Compile Heart would approach collaborations in the future -- compare it to their other collaboration games and see how that evolved over time -- because while Cross Edge feels like a one-off crossover event in a gacha game, it isn't, really. When I was thinking about it some more I was noticing that a huge amount of Compile Heart's output is crossover collaborations like this. They just got a lot better about dialing it in. Going into it more would warrant a full essay so I'll leave it there and say that's kind of where my mind's at right now. I don't think I've seen enough of Cross Edge yet so I'll need to fight through some of the less penetrable mechanical decisions they've made with it to refine my thoughts a bit more. Also I'm going to need to play Trinity Universe. that feels like an important middle step from what I've heard.

2025-04-14

After finishing up that Neptunia piece, for the sake of curiosity I tried Neptunia x SENRAN KAGURA: Ninja Wars for about an hour or so. It's an okay little hack-and-slash, but I hate the Live2D on the Senran characters. I was talking to some people in chat about it and I was noting that I don't see a whole lot of overlap in the audience of people who like Neptunia and the people who like Senran Kagura. Zeda theorized that it might have something to do with the way the series approach writing, saying "i find the neptunias largely endearing and i mostly enjoy their antics meanwhile trying to sit through senran kagura felt like sitting through a seasonal ecchi but like a low budget ecchi that doesnt even have any real titilation", and that sounds about right to me. It's two pretty different approaches and what works for one person doesn't seem to work for another, from my limited sample set of like five people i know who've talked about it, including myself.

I took the pokemon quiz and got to about 820 of them before stopping. I'm solid and know all of them up through gen 4, and then my knowledge starts falling off a bit, with the 3DS games in particular being especially weak, so I've been replaying Pokemon Y and trying to use mostly new pokemon. It's pretty good! The main story could've used a couple more drafts and the focus on all the popular old pokemon kind of obscured how neat a lot of the new mons are, but if I just throw all the gen 1 pokemon in the PC and try scouring the map for new and more interesting mons, what I find is a delightful little game with a ton of cute details and a lot of pretty engaging subsystems. Pokemon-Amie and Super Training are cool ways to help make it feel like you're training and bonding with your pokemon instead of just wandering around throwing rats at people. The fashion system is great, and as you engage with the systems more and explore the region in more depth and put on the more expensive clothes your trainer starts looking more and more like the explorer-champions of past games -- Cynthia and Steven, mainly. It's a shame they keep paring back the fashion system and taking away the most important parts of the outfit.
I think the gyms have started losing the plot a bit. This came into stark relief for me when I was walking into the Psychic gym here and it folded reality away and morphed into the cosmic JRPG floating platform dimension. I thought back to the psychic gyms the earlier games. Sabrina's gym was a teleporter maze but the building itself was just a warehouse. Same deal with Tate and Liza from Ruby and Sapphire, that was a spinning arrow maze, but it was still just a warehouse at the edge of town. I think they got caught up a bit too much in the whimsy of the anime's presentation and forgot that the games have generally been pretty grounded, with the Pokemon being the main fantastical element.

I never got around to Pokemon Alpha Sapphire or its counterpart, so I picked that up as well. It's Gen 3 again, but now with more story and less interesting wild pokemon encounters. I'm mostly thinking about how they changed Granite Cave here. I think it's worse off for locking Aron and Mawile and Sableye behind the Mach Bike. Those were crucial interesting early-game mons. The Mudkip line continues to steamroll over the game and that seemed a bit boring so I'm going to try swapping out my entire early-game team for some of the midgame mons. The environmental changes are neat and the places look very pretty, and they seem to be trying to flesh out Brendan and Wally's arcs a bit more, but I guess I'll see how it pans out.

I gave Pokemon Sun another shot and, man, coming off of X and Y this seems just so stripped back. The presentation is a bit more detailed, it's continuing in the vein of making the games more like the anime, but fuck it sure seems like it would have been more interesting if they had committed a bit more and just made this a more full-throated JRPG. I feel like a narrative JRPG is happening five feet away with Lillie and Gladion but I'm still stuck here following the adventures of Self Insert Generico when I could be playing as Lillie or Gladion instead and getting a fresh and exciting experience. Just move the camera over five feet! Fuck!!!
Besides that, for some reason my 3DS emulator wouldn't read the X or Y inputs from my controller so I couldn't save and I stopped after an hour and don't feel especially compelled to go back yet.

I've been playing some more Void Terrarium. It continues to be what it initially presented as. Success or failure in the mystery dungeon segments feels like it's more dependent on rolling good skills than it is on playing well. Void Terrarium 2 seems to be a direct continuation and more of the same.

Continuing my Neptunia series revisit I gave Hyperdevotion Noire another shot. I'm usually fine with games running at 30FPS but man this game is really choppy and kind of a mess. It's an okay enough strategy RPG underneath that but even with a 60FPS fan patch it's just missing something. I dunno. This one's rough man.

I gave Megatagmension Blanc + Neptune vs Zombies another shot. I have no idea what my problem with it was on the Vita, it's fine. It's a schlock pulp zombie story that leans into Blanc being kind of a bad writer. It's fun. The combat is pretty basic and that's fine enough.

I gave Superdimension Neptune vs. Sega Hard Girls another go, though unlike the previous few spinoffs I wrote about this is a replay of one I've actually finished instead of one I dropped. This is still probably my favorite Neptunia title. A lot of that is riding on the back of IF being my favorite character, but it's a lot more polished than most of the games in the series. It's pretty good. I only played like an hour of it over the last couple weeks though and my last playthrough would've been at launch in 2016 so most of this game is not fresh enough for me to write about it more than that.

I played about 45 minutes of Lapis x Labyrinth. Man how do I describe this. It feels kind of like Maplestory? It's taking a lot of the conventions of RPGs and applying them to a platformer? It's hard to describe. You build a party of characters with varying classes and then you run around a 2D platforming stage with all of them in a stack, fighting hordes of monsters in combat rooms. There are a million particle effects flying around at any given time. It feels okay enough to control but it's not something I really want to go back to.

I played a bit of a couple of the Rhythm Heavens. They're charming. They're executed well. They didn't grab me.

I hooked my PS3 back up and went digging through its catalogue again. Man, it feels like everything in the PS3 store is heavily discounted now, and man, there really weren't that many RPGs on PS3. At a rough count I'm seeing about 83 distinct entries, give or take, and about 12 of them came out of Idea Factory, so about 1 in 7 of the RPGs on the platform were by them. Anyway I decided to continue diving into the Compile Heart catalog and picked up the Record of Agarest War games. I played about an hour of Agarest 1 and I was expecting a lot worse from its reputation. It seems okay. Kind of budget, but pretty clearly in the mold of a lot of the RPGs on the Vita that would come later.

2025-04-01

I wanted a bit of a change of pace from the grind of turn-based RPGs, so I picked up Freedom Wars Remastered. It's still Freedom Wars, it's still pretty good. It's a sci-fi monster hunt-em-up and most of the missions are over pretty quickly. At least, it seems pretty fast compared to what I remember missions being like in games like God Eater or Soul Sacrifice. There was some noise being made about it using AI voices when the remaster came out but those were in the original release so I think that might just have been a kneejerk reaction. I got to rank 6 and decided I should take a break from it after playing 15 hours of it over two days.

Getting back to my bread and butter of games I never once saw anyone really talking about casually but which look pretty mysterious in the games listing (positive), I picked up void tRrLM();++. I'm only an hour into it right now, but as best as I can tell it's kind of a mix between mystery dungeon game and Tamagotchi. I don't know that there's any other way to really describe it, that's just what it is. You've got mystery dungeon segments where you go out to look for materials to build up your base, but sometimes you get interrupted because the Tamagotchi system says you need to go and feed your human. I'll see if I can come up with a better description when I get further into it. It's pretty charming though.

2025-03-30

Fantavision 202X is my favorite punchline for Playstation first-party games, because it's just not really like anything else. If I were younger and more of the angry Youtuber type I think I'd just rip on it and call it a bad video game what were they thinking???? smash that like button gamers et cetera, but last night I sat down with it and tried engaging with it seriously. I played a session of it to credits and I think it's charming, in its way. Fantavision exists in something of a no-man's land between action puzzle games and rhythm games; not quite Lumines and not quite Gitaroo Man, but something in-between. It doesn't land quite as gracefully as those do, but at least on Easy mode it was about 45 minutes of arcadey puzzling while watching a whole lot of flashing lights and stock footage. Fantavision, if you haven't played it before, is an arcade-style game about putting on a fireworks show. As you float over the city undetonated fireworks will fly out of the corners of the screen and you have to arrest them with your cursor. I don't fully understand the mechanics, but the way it works as far as I can say is that you aim the cursor with the left stick and then shoot it out to a firework with X. You can then chain to other fireworks of the same color or to a wild card, kind of like Uno. After setting up some fireworks in the chain, you can make them detonate with O. However, each firework has a lifetime to it, and you have to make it detonate before the timer runs out. The game keeps a score of how many fireworks you've chained together and you're ranked at the end of the stage on your combo and percentage of fireworks detonated in a manner reminiscent of a rhythm game. However, it doesn't feel like there's a beat or a rhythm to it. The game is just fast and frenetic and there's not a whole lot of order to it. You're at the fireworks factory and everything's exploding. It is a pure flashing lights kind of game. Every two stages it plays some stock footage of some people working with test tubes and then the environment changes. First to a city, then to a futuristic city, then to space, and then to the geometry nodes dimension. It's a curious sort of game.

I hit credits on Neptunia Re;Verse, as part of my ongoing investigation into most of the Neptunia releases since Super Neptunia RPG. That sure is just Neptunia Re;birth 1 again. There's even a line about 7 chapters in where Neptune says it's Re;Birth 1 and doesn't change the script at all to account for this being Re;Verse. There are some mechanical changes in there according to the wiki, but the main difference is that there's a fishing minigame now that works with the Dualsense's haptic triggers. It's a pretty decent use of it. The fish fights back by increasing the resistance on the trigger and when it gets tired out the button gets easier to press, and you want to press it as far as you can without triggering the rumble. It's a pretty solid fishing minigame as they go, and I spent a solid few hours just zoning out and fishing at the various ponds there. I just wish it would keep the party leader you were using instead of forcibly changing the character to Neptune when you entered the map.

I've been starting to try picking away at Ogre Battle and Ogre Battle 64 since Unicorn Overlord's left me wanting more. The tutorial's a bit lacking and I don't have a good sense of how to build units and teams so I've been trying to do some homework before playing too much and I've been reading some GameFAQs guides to try getting any footing. I'm not quite there yet. There's a lot of systems the game dumps on you and it's a lot to take in. The battles take up a lot of time and even the shortest map seems like it takes more time than the longest Unicorn Overlord stage.

2025-03-26

I got back around to Unicorn Overlord after putting it down an hour in and meaning to get back around to it a year ago. I just got the platinum trophy. I almost even understand how the game works now. I'm not totally sure what I think of it yet. Everything's been polished to a mirror sheen and that makes it harder for me to write about, since "it's good" is one of those thought-terminating cliches. I also don't really have a ton of experience with this subgenre and that's also getting in the way of writing about it. I think I'm going to need to play Ogre Battle and Ogre Battle 64 while I stew on it.

2025-03-21

I'm continuing to play all the Neptunias I missed (except the Senran crossover because I don't want to play that one). I'm playing so many of them that I'm thinking I might turn my thoughts on it into some kind of essay, by which I mean I'm about 3500 words into it. A lot of the initial draft is done right now, though I still need to finish Re:Verse and Game Maker Re:Volution and give Top Nep a shot. Also I need to finish VVVTuber for completion's sake even though I'm not going to wring any more thoughts out of it. I started and finished Riders Vs. Dogoos in just about exactly two hours today, which was a nice change of pace. It was kind of like Twisted Metal.

2025-03-11

I never got very far into Neptunia: Sisters vs Sisters so I've picked that back up to see what was different about it compared to R:Evolution. The game maker system is there as well, though without the creator level system there's not a whole lot of reason to make games regularly like there is in R:Evolution and there's no notifications telling you when the timers have finished so it's pretty easy to forget about it after you've equipped the party with some discs to make the action combat more bearable. Speaking of the action combat, it's a bit more restricted like I remembered, with combos being limited by action points. Once I was engaging with all the systems Sisters vs Sisters became pretty decent, but I can imagine they removed some of the friction in R:Evolution to give the game a better first impression. As is pretty standard for Neptunia, they make one set of maps and then reuse them for the entire console generation, as I recognized most of the locations from R:Evolution. Sisters vs Sisters does differentiate itself from a lot of other Neptunia titles, however, in that they have fully modeled Planeptune and it is massive and sprawling, with at least two dozen maps to it, possibly more, with tons of verticality to it and multiple floors to everything. There's not much to do there, but it's really cool that they did that, and there is some fun to just zoning out and drinking in the scenery in that sort of digital tourism way some people do with old MMOs and Second Life spaces. Though, with how much work they put into it I'm shocked I haven't seen it again in R:Evolution, and I also expect I won't see it again in Riders Vs. Dogoos if I pick that up. It's extremely out of character for Idea Factory to not reuse assets like that, especially for such a major location with as many locations as it has so I can only assume they've got some bigger plan for it that doesn't fit into their annual release model. It would be a neat direction for the series to sit down and really flesh it out in an homage to Sega's Kamurocho. That, paired with the move to action combat and the increase in minigames has me wondering if that might be the plan.

2025-03-09

I've been playing more Neptunia R:Evolution over the last couple of days and the PS5 menu says I'm about 60% of the way through now. The loop in it has started feeling a bit like idly checking a social media app. You set some guys to make a game and then there's a toast saying it's done and you go into the menu and click on the app and set them to making another game because there's a second layer of grinding involved in getting your guys able to make better-performing games. There's a lot of implicit messages in the way they've structured the system that seem pretty interesting in the context of Idea Factory being one of the successors to midcard company Data East.
The sorts of ideas that are embedded in the game maker system here are like: You get better at games by making a lot of games. Your early games are going to be bad. Some people are bad at making games, but with effort and the right team they can shine. Nobody makes a great game alone. If you believe in a team and let them iterate they will eventually put out something great. Sometimes you'll put your best team on something and they'll underperform. It can't be helped. That sort of stuff. It's a system that feels true to Idea Factory's experience, like a sober reflection on a lifetime in the industry. It's a message that runs counter to what the rest of the industry's doing right now, constantly churning through young grads and throwing out the more experienced staff and constantly shifting teams around, never letting anyone really iterate.

2025-03-05

I booted up the PS5 for the first time in a while and picked up Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution. It's solid enough. It feels like it's building on the action combat system they started using in Sisters V. Sisters but they've had some more time to iron it out a bit more and it works pretty well. The game making subsystem they've got is pretty reminiscent of Game Dev Tycoon or something similar. It's on the better end of the Neptunias they've released in the last decade. I wonder if Idea Factory's trying to switch Neptunia over to an action RPG series like Tales because turn-based RPGs are back in force while action RPGs are dormant in the sort of way that turn-based RPGs were in the PS3 era.

2025-03-01

I guess I'm on an old Pokémon game kick because I went and dug out my old Pokémon Diamond cartridge and did a playthrough of that on one of my old DS Lites. It's been a hot minute since I last played through it (the encounter dates on my Pearl cartridge say I last touched it in 2009), so I've essentially played it from scratch. I wanted to play it on cartridge because it feels like it's gotten too easy to mess around with romhacks that tweak the experience to sand off the edges or use PKhex to edit the natures and IVs and EVs on the pokémon to make things feel a bit cleaner, or use speedup to get through everything faster.

Here's the team I ended up finishing the playthrough with last night. Choice Specs Mismagius was carrying me pretty hard by the end. I was chugging revives in the Cynthia fight a fair bit and ended it by using Perish song on her Milotic because I just couldn't break through it otherwise. Pokemon Diamond is: pretty good. There's a decent amount of variety to mess around with and the challenges are decently interesting. The main thing that stuck out to me while playing on actual hardware without any balance adjustments is that, man, you should really start trading pokémon with another cartridge after a couple gyms. The XP gains are way off curve unless you're doing that. I traded the Mismagius over from my Pearl cartridge around the point it became available, and did the same with the Gible after I beat the steel gym and those two ended up being the strongest and most useful mons on my roster.

2025-02-17

I went and did another playthrough of Pokemon Crystal (with a romhack that edits how trade evos work a bit and lets you refight gym leaders). No randomizer or anything, just a vanilla playthrough. I wanted to try engaging with the systems and progression a bit and try using just a bunch of good pokemon. It was interesting. I ended up swapping out my starter around level 28 because it just wasn't keeping up with the rest of the team, in favor of adding in a mon that got better move coverage earlier (read: swapping quilava out for vulpix because vulpix learns flamethrower at level 31). Paying a bit more attention to what mons they were putting in the routes meant noticing that you can get a Tauros right after the ghost gym, and Tauros is pretty good. STAB Strength is really nothing to sneeze at. The Geodude you can get on like route 46 at level 2 early-game is crazy good. Falkner, Bugsy, and Morty are all weak to it and it resists Whitney. Just absolutely rolls over the first half of the game, and the Slowpoke you can find in the well in Azalea Town can basically solo the elite 4 by itself if you teach it Ice Beam. Headbutt is an interesting mechanic but man, I just could not find a good excuse to use any of the Heracross or Exeggcute I found in the trees, or the Scyther I got out of the bug-catching contest. They were all just outclassed way too fast and took too long to get any useful tools. I think I got a new appreciation for what Gen 2 was doing this playthrough.

2025-02-08

I've been thinking about old RPGs some more and talked myself into playing a bit of Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. It holds up better than I expected for it being a 40-year-old microcomputer game. There's a lot of verbs and I've gotta check the manual from time to time to remember which hotkey activates which mode, but once I got the general gist of "ask NPCs each of the three basic talk actions of name, job, health, and then whatever keywords they mentioned" it's seemed pretty chill overall. The text parser and all the hotkeys make navigation feel more involved than delegating everything to one context-sensitive button that applies the verbs for you. Wandering around is neat, though if you can't find a ship or a random warp gate it's pretty easy to get stuck. Brittania feels big and sometimes I'll wander into neat little setpieces, like the pirate's cove. I died there, but I could see an approach to it where you're hopping from boat to boat taking out bandits and stealing their ships, creating this little swashbuckling setpiece. It's a cool game.

2025-01-27

I was watching a playthrough of Golden Sun and it reminded me that I'd left my cartridge of Golden Sun: The Lost Age off right at the final boss. I'd never been able to finish it because I think I left off somewhere around level 33 and the minimum recommended level from all the GameFAQs guides back in the day was somewhere around 40 and I just didn't have the stats to finish out the third phase, even if I could get through the first two. Today I spent a few hours clearing up some loose ends and then doing a little bit of grinding to get my party up to par. I finished it out and rolled credits on it after putting it off for about 20 years. Golden Sun is still a really well-crafted game. It's dense with systems and mechanics and some really well-crafted art assets. All the environments are rounded and densely-packed in something of a flex to show off how good their asset backend is. The djinn/class/psynergy systems are unmatched in how intricately-woven they are. Golden Sun is the sort of game that can only come out of an RPG developer being allowed to iterate and refine their techniques and approach and working at the top of their game. I wish the veteran developers at Camelot would make RPGs instead of sports games again.

2025-01-26

I played a couple episodes of Anthology of the Killer today. That sure is a thecatamites game. It's got a bit more of a coherent structure than usual, with everything being loosely themed around murder it's a bit easier to follow the through-line than the usual Joycean stream of consciousness his games tend to have. Aesthetically it feels like it's building on what was being explored in Seven Beautiful Postcards with the camera lazily following the player, but -- and maybe this is a reach -- I feel like thecatamites was taking some ideas from Jake Clover here. There's a bit more mixing of gameplay modes and 2D/3D aesthetics than thecatamites usually goes for in a way that reminds me a bit of what was going on in Gradient Addiction (note: i'm probably just being stupid and forgetting some of thecatamites's other games that did something like this earlier, like goblet grotto. i just wanted an excuse to talk about gradient addiction). Mechanically, Anthology is doing the same thing thecatamites's Unity games usually do. You walk around spaces and trigger text and screen transitions when walking into various areas, though this time the text is a bit more grounded, being trapped in a box at the bottom of the screen instead of appearing at some point one Vector3.UP above the trigger location. It works pretty well.

2025-01-22

I played a bit of Pokemon Violet. I think learning about the competitive scene is the worst thing that's happened for my enjoyment of the games. Now I know how the stats work, and how natures affect them, and how held items help out, and how much of a difference natures and EVs make in how the game feels, and it sucks. What used to be a fun game about catching monsters and clicking buttons is now this grinding, tortuous affair of checking the natures and then looking up what mons give out what EVs and then fighting a bunch of them to get the stat growths up. I've been using PKhex to cut down on the busywork and get back to the game a bit faster but I wish the game would expose the tools to get to it faster. It's not 1996 or 2002 anymore. Pokemon aren't a mystery anymore. There's over a thousand of them now and the data structure's been rigorously documented. I wish they'd cut the cost of the mints and the vitamins and the held items in the shops by like 100 so people could mess around with them a bit more easily.

I played a bit of Touhoumon: Another World Revised. It's fine enough for what it is. It's a more standard RPG adventure built on the bones of a Fire Red ROM. It's pretty good as far as Pokemon ROM hacks go.

2024-12-12

I saw that IA/VT: Colorful got a translation patch, and it reminded me that I never got around to that even though I've had it on my wishlist since it released back in 2015, so I sat down and played a bit of it. IA/VT Colorful is one of those B-tier pure rhythm games that just releases and then doesn't have a long tail of DLC songs and live service behind it. It doesn't have a story mode like Elite Beat Agents or the Persona Dancing series, it's just a pure rhythm game where you work through songs in a setlist. Maybe that's why I confused it with Superbeat Xonic back in the day, because that's similarly just a pure rhythm game that just came and went. It's pretty good. It does this thing where the notes have been laid down along a vector curve and that lets them adjust the note field on the fly to create a more dynamic and visually interesting note chart than usual. Mechanically, I expected the note chart to work like Gitaroo Man when I saw it with all its swooping curves and flowing notes, but there's no analogue stick component to it, it's just visual flair here. The timing window on the notes is pretty wide, which is good for me because I'm very bad at rhythm games and even I'm consistently full clearing these songs.

2024-11-28

I picked up Pokemon TCG Pocket the other day and it's pretty decent. It cuts the maximum deck size down from 40-60 cards to only 20 so that matches go by faster, and it all works together pretty well. I was running a Mewtwo/Gardevoir deck for most of the last event since it was good and reasonably consistent, but I feel like I'm having the most success with a Starmie EX/ Articuno EX/ Greninja deck. At least, that's what gave me the most trouble when I was playing against AIs and it lets me get through the Charizard EX decks that I've been really struggling to deal with otherwise. It's pretty good, I lost an entire Sunday to get the 45 wins I needed to get the last rewards in the event / 10.

I got a bit deeper into Class of Heroes, but not a ton. I got to the second academy where the principal's putting on a disguise to pretend like the school has any students and unlocked the Arena, where you can refight bosses for their drops at no penalty. It seems like it potentially breaks the difficulty curve in half.

I played a bit of King's Field 4. You can really feel the sorts of ideas that would lead to Demon's Souls in it, with this mysterious continent where people go missing and a whole bunch of undead everywhere, and these gloomy, hopeless NPCs all over the place. It's as slow and methodical as the King's Fields usually are and you have to be careful and methodical and save regularly lest you die thoughtlessly and lose an hour of progress. I've gotten up to the point where I've restored the Healing Spring and started delving into the Lost City's ruins, and I've started getting iron gear, though I'm not quite sure what to do about the giant Guardians in the ruins. I think if I want to progress I need to get one of the control crowns from earlier in the dungeon, though I think there's an item behind that golem and I'm not sure how to get that without getting killed. I can only stand it in bursts, but it's still pretty good.

I played about five floors deep into Wizardry: The Five Ordeals ~ Traveler's Property. It's a lot less forgiving than most of the other dungeon crawlers I've played, but after a little while, around the time that I was building up a second party to retrieve the corpses of my first party that died on a floor where I couldn't cast the automap spell, the loop started to click. In much the same vein as the early Wizardries, the party is totally fungible and you should try to keep track of where you are by making your own map. Pen and paper will work, but I opted to go with Gridmonger to keep track of the map state outside of the game's built-in automap (that you can only use while one of your mages knows the spell and has first-level spell slots left).

There's something interesting in the game that I'm not really getting anywhere else. Here's an example: At one point I was exploring down in the fourth floor and one of my party members got poisoned, and I didn't have any antidotes and the priest spell to cure poison is a really high level spell. Reviving units is expensive and unreliable, and if the revival fails I'm out a good unit and also several thousand gold, so I decided to leave the unit down in the dungeon and made a note of where they were on the map. I went back up, healed up the rest of the party, and grabbed an antidote from the item storage. I went back down, figuring the unit would surely be dead, but they were exactly as I'd left them. I picked them back up, healed them with the antidote, and this saved me the unit and several thousand gold. This was an interesting choice with some neat push-pull that I haven't really gotten in most of the other dungeon crawlers I've played.

2024-10-29

I played about seven more hours of Class of Heroes and got out of the tutorial and into the rest of the game loop now. Class of Heroes starts off pretty tough and then rapidly eases up the minute you start getting any gear on your units. There aren't a ton of buffs or debuffs that I've seen with the party I made so most fights have just been using the Bahamoon's breath weapon for crowd control and then having the rest of the party pick the other enemies off, resorting to the mage spells when I run into ghosts. Gear seems to matter a lot here, and I think you're expected to engage with the alchemy and enhancement systems for most upgrades and progress outside of the casting classes. It's been pretty breezy since I got my guys geared up a bit. I haven't seen any poison heal spells so I'm just steering clear of poison gas trapped chests right now since the opportunity cost there just isn't worth the resources unless I'm really close to the entrance.

Oh right, the core loop. The game's broadly divided into three types of places: towns, paths, and labyrinths. The towns are hub areas where you get quests and resupply on items and spells and gear, paths seem to be maps three floors in length where the first and last floors are drawn randomly from a pool of prefab areas, and where the middle floor is something more bespoke, and the labyrinths are more traditional maze explorer dungeons with more involved tricks. It's an interesting way of handling things, and the way they've structured the game lets them make a bigger game with less work. In contrast to something like Elminage or Wizardry Variants Daphne, getting to other points on the map requires at least a little bit of dungeon crawling instead of just letting you get there. After unlocking the various shortcuts in the prefab maps on the initial crawl, subsequent crawls through them are pretty cursory, but it gives it all a bit more depth, since getting in and out of the labyrinths requires you to make your way out of the maze and then an extra couple maps full of monsters and traps, adding to the lethality and making it pretty clear why people might not travel outside of their area. I don't know how much sense that makes in the world of Class of Heroes, but it fits in great with the setting of Wizardry Xth, where the academies are the last bastions of safety in a world overrun with monsters. It's all pretty neat, though I think I'd probably make the alchemy a bit easier to engage with if I were making my own dungeon crawler, which I am. Locking all the recipes behind gradual unlocks and buying them from the shop makes sense on a first draft but it is crucially: not fun or especially interesting to engage with. Most of the alchemy is locked behind farming materials, just let people pick some and have it automatically pull up the recipe or something.

2024-10-27

I've been looking into some even more obscure dungeon crawlers since Variants Daphne finally released, so I'll go into some of those.

Wizardry Xth: Academy of Frontier and Generation Xth - Code Hazard are more of a historical curiosity at this point. I've been delving pretty deep into the dungeon crawler scene and trying to pick apart the tiny differences between games, but Wizardry Xth is just Class of Heroes, and Generation Xth is just Operation Abyss. They have a different coat of paint over them, but they're so similar underneath that there's not a lot of reason to go out of your way to grab these versions specifically, especially since the remakes are easily available on Steam, unless you want to see the incredible engrish in the OP, where you will learn all about the Deamons and the Dragons Braeth, and how the long war was for who get "WIN". Fighting got stalemate though. And other such phrases that will never leave my vocabulary now. Great. So why was I looking into them?

These two games are historically notable in the development of dungeon crawlers as they were at the forefront of the genre's revival, and the people who worked on them would go on to make a lot of the dungeon crawlers that came about later. I like a lot of Experience Inc's work, so I was trying to look into these to see if there was something I didn't know. And then it turned out they were games I'd already played with a different coat of paint. An interesting coat of paint to be sure -- Wizardry Xth has a lot of deep fog and stark reds on black environments and it all feels very SMT Nocturne, but it's just Class of Heroes. And Generation Xth is interesting to look into but it's pretty jank on modern monitors and I really just prefer the way Operation Abyss looks over it.

On that note, I think I forgot to write about Class of Heroes on here. Class of Heroes takes a lot of the Wizardry base and expands on it in a lot of ways that seem more sensible to me after trying to sit down and make my own and trying to figure out how you even expand on it. There's a handful of new races that exist to interact with new tile types in more interesting ways and to address the issue of fighters not being able to hit AOE. I haven't made it very far in but it has a lot of little things going on that make it neat.

I'm giving Elminage Original another spin. I would recommend playing it on an emulator that has speedup, it's a lot more enjoyable with that. I think I originally played it on 3DS but I think Citra got wiped out when Yuzu did, so the version that's still accessible if you don't have an old version of Citra still lying around would be on PSP. Elminage Original is a pretty classic style of dungeon crawler. I don't have a ton to say about it right now, I'm barely through the first dungeon.

2024-06-11

I've managed to get back to playing some video games after spending a month or so not really doing much besides my daily drawings. I mentioned that I tried switching to Windows for a bit, but I've ended up switching back to Linux (running Fedora since I was talking to people and it seemed like it just works better out of the box) after all of Microsoft's recent troubles with putting trojans on people's computers, and just kind of being low-grade annoyed with windows, and I wasn't using it for much besides Clip Studio, and even then I was just drawing on my iPad instead. Anyway I played about six floors of Javardry, a Wizardry clone written in Java that has a decent scenario editor on the site. I really like the art that とり夫 did for it. The heavy shadows and more realistic rendering gives it a tone that feels somewhere between SMT and the Dark Spire, which is just fantastic. The game is a retread of Wizardry mechanically, and the floors are small enough to feel pretty brisk, since the maps cap out at 20x20. It's neat. I want to make a scenario in it sometime.

A friend had a spare code for Eiyuuden: Hundred Heroes lying around and gave it to me. I played about ten hours of it and it seems pretty good. The characters seem pretty distinct and good, though I don't know if any of the other hundred will live up to the bar that Francesca set early on. I made it to just a bit past where you get your castle and switched the focal character and then went, hey, I never played--

Suikoden is a PS1 RPG made by Konami in 1995, nearly 30 years ago now. I blitzed through it over the space of about two days. It's great, and deserves its reputation. It hits a lot of the same sorts of story beats as Water Margin-- you're branded as outlaws and make your base in a castle near the water while fighting against the corrupt rulers of the state. The band is originally led by someone else but they transfer leadership responsibilities to someone everyone can respect when they die. There are shady inns that serve poison to try and kill the travelers (presumably leaving out the bit where they then sell the people's remains as meat buns), but recognize the rebels and see their mistake. There's the thieves that break into a reluctant potential ally's house to steal a treasure to bait them out. It mostly differs at the end. The party defeats the empire and the emperor takes his evil witch wife down with him. That part seems more of an illusion to Investiture of the Gods than Water Margin, but it's fine. A friend said the ending hit them pretty hard as a kid, and I can see why, it's pretty effective. Then, right after that, I downloaded a save file off the internet last night and booted up

Suikoden 2. I'm only a couple hours in right now, but it feels like it takes the rough sketch of a setting that Suikoden 1 had and colors it in and renders it in more detail. The towns are bigger, multi-map affairs now. There's more places, with more people, and you see a more detailed cross-section of what life is like and how people live. It seems good, and I'm looking forward to stopping writing so I can get back to it.

2024-04-22

I still haven't been playing too much. I've been trying to focus my free time a bit more on doing art and making things, and that by necessity comes at the cost of something else, which is in this case playing video games. I set up a new desk the other day and moved my computer over to it so it can be more of a workstation that's physically separated from the place where I play games. The way it's set up also seems like it might make it possible for me to try learning how to play piano without being insanely cumbersome like the last couple of times I've tried it. Anyway I've been playing Pokémon Heartgold Version over the last couple days. Just a casual run, nothing too out there. My team had a bunch of Pokemon that had trade evolutions so I modded the rom with a randomizer to make that possible without a huge hassle. Right now I'm rolling with a party of Rhydon, Scizor, Gengar, Machamp, Slowbro, and Ho-Oh. I've swapped the team around a bit but I think it's settled into a decent place right now, ten gyms in. Most of my pokemon playthroughs just used a single strong pokemon to sweep through the game so I didn't understand why people complained about HMs as much as they did, but I think I get it more now. There's usually 8 HMs and pokemon only get four moveslots to work with, so in order to progress through the game you have to give up two mons' worth of moves just to progress instead of focusing on interesting team-building., and you can't get rid of them without a lot of hassle. I felt this most clearly when I wanted to give Scyther Slash, but the only move I wanted to give up was the strictly inferior Cut. I ended up deleting it with the move deleter and replacing it with the move tutor, but I can see why there was so much relief at not having to deal with that anymore when Sun and Moon rolled around.

2024-04-11

I've gone back to the mazes and started giving Demon Gaze Extra another shot after not having played it since, I dunno, probably 2015 or 2016 on the Vita. I can't find my old save data so I can't check. Either way, I put around 30 hours into it over the weekend. It seems a lot more forgiving and relaxed than Experience's other dungeon crawlers. There aren't any hard level caps and you don't need to spend a bunch of time rerolling stats, and the demons can function a bit more passively than the sort of one round boost system that something like Undernauts or Mon-Yu expects you to be using on the regular. The autobattle system is a toggle that you turn on that persists between fights, repeating your last commands until you turn it off. The soundtrack isn't doing anything too crazy but it works pretty well. They've got a couple of leitmotifs they repeat throughout the game, and they use vocaloids when they want to add some more texture to the tracks. It's all pretty standard contract music stuff, but it's a standard because it works. The story isn't doing anything too crazy. They came up with ideas for a bunch of zones and then stapled them together, so you end up in a place in the midgame where you've got to deliver a letter from the shark priest to the coroner who can't read it to make some medicine to resurrect their shark god that's actually a manta ray to get the lever to activate the elevator to get to the basement of the castle so you can get the sixth demon to open the doors in the second basement to get the crystal to activate the clocktower to turn on the power to the elevator that goes to the higher floors to get to the path that leads to the other side of the locked door in the graveyard. That sort of thing. It's not doing anything too out there but it all works together fine, and it's pretty clear that the main focus is on crawling the dungeons. The exploration's a lot more horizontal than most of the other dungeon crawler's I've played. Zones will be comprised of multiple maps, but the only one with a ton of verticality so far was the clocktower, where you had to climb up eight flights of stairs, drop down, and then do it again on the other side of the walls on the first floor. It works pretty well. The zones have all been pretty discrete and only started having multiple floors around halfway through, and most of the time they keep it to two or less. There's a larger sixteen-floor dungeon, but it opens up early on and you can only make progress in it as you get more of the demons that make up the main progression, so I've just been chipping away at that as I've progressed. That balance helps it a lot. I'm digging what Demon Gaze is doing a bunch. It's neat.

2024-04-02

I'm trying Chrono Trigger again. I haven't gotten too far in because I'm just trying to drink in the atmosphere, but knowing about Kato's later work I started paying attention to the cats a bit more. There's one in Chrono's room when you wake up, and a bowl for their food, and it seems like there's a system for feeding them. There's a few cats at the Millennial Faire. One of them is the little girl's that you help her find, and the other is Gato the robot. It didn't register that Gato had cat ears initially, or that it should be tied in with Kato's fondness for cats.
I've ground out the silver points for all the best equipment I can buy at this point in the game, but I want to make sure I feed Chrono's cat before I advance any further.
The world map at the start of the game is bigger than I remember. I don't think I ever went and explored across the bridge the last few times I tried playing it, but it's interesting how it sets up some tension between the two towns in the present. Chrono's village has a good and fair mayor who wants to help out adventurers, and the mayor in the town across the bridge is corrupted by money, paying people to embarass themselves for his amusement. There's a contrast there to set up something later, it's interesting.

I played a bit of Balatro. I don't know that I have anything to say about it that hasn't been said already. It cuts out the annoying part of deckbuilders where you're like "I don't know what this card does. Is this good?" by replacing them with a standard 52-card deck. I know what a five of hearts is and where that fits into a strategy more than I know if some heal 5 hp card is good. I've won a couple of runs by building around two pair hands. I don't know that it's going to grab me and refuse to let go like it seems to be doing for a lot of people, but it's solid.

2024-03-06

I've continued delving into the dungeons. In the process of looking for more dungeon crawlers despite having something like 20 of them in my backlog already, I found a website dedicated to them, which I'm linking because it's neat. The genre's kind of hard to talk about because it's really straightforward, and the difference between games is relatively small mechanically. However, sometimes I'll run into one that feels different, like 魔導物語1/2/3, the first game in the precursor series to Puyo Puyo. The combat in Sorcery Saga is this curious real-time system where you have to hold down a button and input a command sequence before you can do an attack, a bit like Sabin's blitz inputs in FF6, but without the ATB gauge getting in the way. Puyos make up the bulk of the random encounters I've seen so far, being the generic monster fodder they were designed to be, and sometimes they stack on top of each other to give them more hit points to work with. It's not like much else I've ever played, it's really interesting.

I've continued working my way through Etrian Odyssey 1 and hit the start of the second layer. I don't have much more new to say about it, it's just generally balanced well and each new floor seems to be a real step up in difficulty, harkening back to the sort of "player level is just a reflection of how deep they can reliably get into the dungeon" mentality that was the original justification for calling them player levels back when Gygax was running his first D&D campaigns. I can't remember where I read that though so take it with a grain of salt because I might have just made this up out of whole cloth. It's been at least six years since I was really looking into AD&D stuff and my memory isn't great on a good day. Either way though, I like how for the most part getting to a new floor is a marked step up in difficulty.

I started Undernauts:Labyrinth of Yomi back up. I still think this is probably my favorite one of Experience, Inc.'s dungeon crawlers. It's got this really neat moody atmosphere to it, blending the sorts of lessons they learned from writing all of those horror adventure games on the side with the oppressive atmosphere that's already endemic to the dungeon crawler genre generally to create a sort of horror science fantasy setting, where a bunch of miners get stranded in a labyrinth with a menagerie of grotesqueries with no way to contact the outside world besides receiving one-way radio transmissions, and they have to fight their way out or die. There aren't too many horror-themed turn-based RPGs that I can think of off the top of my head. Sweet Home is the main one. Maybe Parasite Eve or Koudelka count at a stretch? I dunno.

Going back to the opposite end of the spectrum, tonally, I tried playing Dungeon Travelers: To Heart 2 In Another World for a bit. It isn't as well polished as the others mechanically, and I'm not really agreeing with its sort of mid-oughts slapstick, fourth-wall-breaking kind of writing style. If I were feeling lazier I might just dismiss it as anime but that's unfair to it. I would try and pin my distate on a specific person, but I can't find any credits for the game on Mobygames, and it doesn't seem like there's a specific, consistent writer for all the Toheart2 games that I can find from cross-referencing between VNDB and Mobygames. It might just be the house style at Aquaplus I don't like, honestly.

After seeing someone post a screed posted by someone else translated from some Chinese forum about how the people on the forum just don't listen to someone who has actually shipped a game and other such bigheaded comments, I decided to pick up FallingStarTown: The Ghost From Past and see how it is. This one's better suited to the RPG Maker page, but I'm here right now and can't be bothered to click off the editor. Mechanically, it's all reasonably competent. It seems like it's some kind of adventure game about coming to terms with your forgotten past or something. The presentation is alright. The character sprites animate and emote and the person's put some work into presenting it well with the limitations they had. It mostly all works fine (mechanically, not necessarily writing-wise), and the screen has this kind of damped lerp to it that lags behind the character a bit that probably took some work to implement. Mechanically it's all functional. I'll comment on the story later if I ever go back to it, though all the surface-level hack comments about like 'have you ever heard of quantum mechanics' don't inspire a lot of confidence. I'm assuming there will be something about how all his friends were killed by the meteor in the last festival, which is what caused his retrograde amnesia where he can't remember any of the people he used to spend time with. I'm further assuming the festival for meeting the dead will turn out to be some gateway to a parallel world whoa quantum mechanics that's crazy. Something like that. I'm only an hour in though, so maybe the game will surprise me if I ever go back to it.

2024-02-17:

I've been playing Etrian Odyssey 1 HD. it's pretty similar to the other wizardry-likes, though the way it limits your team to 5 and has limits on the amount of people who can be in the front or back line creates an interesting tension. The FOEs are neat and add a bit of threat to the dungeons without needing to resort to damage tiles. The skill trees offer some interesting customization tools, though I think I'd prefer to never have to deal with a skill tree in my life if I can help it.

2024-02-05:

I've been playing a bit of Wizardry: Llylgamyn Saga on the PS1. It's doing a lot of neat things, but words are currently failing me on describing them because I'm writing the things I'm noticing into code and those parts of my brain aren't on speaking terms.

I played a bit of Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth. It's cringe-inducing and I don't have the strength to power through it yet. I'll get back to it later.

2024-01-22

I played more Palworld today. This game truly is a Pokemon competitor; it's buggy in all the same kind of playground rumor sorts of ways as Pokemon Red and Blue. One rumor I heard was that if you go into a tower boss fight with a wanted level and have the cops shoot the boss once, but not twice, and then throw a ball at the boss you catch them instantly. Naturally, this absurd and very stupid rumor was 100% real, and I promptly went and caught all the tower bosses I could. They retain their boss HP and have extremely good stats. It doesn't count as a win, but it's extremely funny nonetheless. What a phenomenal video game.

2024-01-21:

I went and finished Fate/Samurai Remnant yesterday, since the collaboration event's up on FGO JP now. I was pretty close to the end before, but it finished out okay enough. It remains pretty much, more or less, the most normal grail war that Fate's depicted. Iori remains the strongest Fate main character. He doesn't win with clever tricks or quirks of rules lawyering, he just hits good with sword. I should get around to doing NG+ and clearing out the other route and seeing the bits of context that get added in the second playthrough to show the actual depths of Iori's desire to fight or whatever it is, but I'll probably put it off for a while.

Palworld came out. It's a treepuncher Ark-like with every joke about the implications of Pokemon that you'd see in gaming webcomics circa 2008 rolled into a pretty comprehensive monster catching and training system. At time of writing SteamDB says there are 1,290,997 people playing it right now, with a peak of 1,291,667 concurrent players 11 minutes ago, putting it at the fifth-highest all-time concurrent player count, 4000 or so behind Dota 2's all time peak. Reports I've seen say it's wreaking havoc on Epic's servers. It's alright. It doesn't seem all that different from any of the other games in this mold that I've mostly only ever seen on Let's Game It Out's channel, but it has more appealing 3D models and runs decently well, and the shock value in its premise got more eyes on it. It remains to be seen if this'll just be a flash in the pan like the time New World had a similar out-of-nowhere surge, but however it shakes out it's probably going to be around for a solid few years on sheer power of 81 million in revenue minimum on day 1, unless they really screw it up.

2024-01-13:

I finished the main game of Plague von Karma's Kanto Expansion Pack today. It makes some interesting changes to Pokemon Red while still keeping things mostly the same. A lot of the bigger changes seem like they're in the postgame, but I've had a pretty decent time with it on the whole so far. It's more Pokemon Red, but now there's a bunch of beta pokemon and it has the various bits and pieces that were changed in Pokemon Yellow and Firered/Leafgreen. There's some level scaling on the gyms so it doesn't run into the problem of the midgame getting easier as you go through gyms 4-7. It's neat.

2024-01-10:

I got the itch to play some knockoff pokemon games, so I picked up a handful of them. I'm giving Casette Beasts another shot. God it's slow. I wish there were a way I could speed up combat animations. I don't understand the type chart in Casette Beasts, but I'll probably sit down and learn it at some point. The stamina meter irks me. I understand why they have it, but it really slows the game down.

2024-01-02:

I tested positive for COVID, so in-between drinking bowls of alka seltzer plus and sleeping and avoiding going to the doctor because I don't have insurance I've decided to finally get around to playing Pokemon: Ultra Moon, because that's the one generation I just fell off of hard. It's fine, it's a Pokemon game. The progression's weighted less towards gym battles that give out badges, but they've been replaced with the 18 little type crystals. I left off at the 'revisit all the islands' bit after the fight with the fairy captain since it seemed tedious.
Sometimes I try and separate out the years and years of experience growing up and playing pokemon games. It's hard, because I've been playing them since before I started forming long-term memories, but sometimes a glimmer will get past all the deeply-rooted pathways and I'll go, huh, pokemon sure is this weird whimsical setting huh. It's hard to write more than that because usually the glimmer of 'what does this game look like from the outside' goes away faster than I can start to recognize what it is

2023-12-27

I picked up some games in the Steam sale. Here Comes Niko is a game I had my eye on since back when it was just twitter gifs. It's a lighthearted game about Niko, a girl who's run away from home for being gay (I think) and found a job working as a professional friend. Go around platforming and helping people to get coins to move to the next zone. I think wholesome games as an aesthetic are a bit overplayed, but I saw this game before wholesome indie game was an established genre, and it oozes charm while having enough tension in its emotional core to not come across as insincere. Movement feels good and I like the way it uses billboarded sprites in a 3D environment. A deeply charming game.

I played a bit of Exit 8, and reached the titular exit 8. I guess it's supposed ot be a horror game, in the sort of vein of those "what if mundane thing went on just a bit too long" videos. you wander through a repeating corridor a bunch of times, and then something changes, and sometimes there's a horror sting. wow.

At the recommendation of a friend I played a bit of Start Again: A Prologue. It's a bit overwrought but it's executed well enough. I'll need to actually go and finish it though, I only did most of two runs through it, and it seems like it's one of those small reactive games that responds to what you do. I'll write about it on the RPG Maker page when I finish it.

I had an hour to kill so I played a bit of a mobile game I got served an ad for, Stormshot. In the space of that hour I ran into five distinct game modes, a gacha system, building timers, limited-time popups for best PVE character buy now, and the most perfunctory and hollow story I've ever seen. The average DMM porn gacha has more heart and artistic vision than this. That said, I do appreciate what it's doing in a kind of "watching a piece of industrial machinery churn out plastic molds by the thousands" kind of way. It's not as raw and naked as one of those pull the pin games that just churn out ad serves, it's a few steps above that, with a perfunctory attempt at storytelling and some attempts at theming and worldbuilding. It's a Caribbean pirate pulp pastiche, with ghost pirates and mermaids and Atlantis and the like, though they stopped short of betrayals and intrigue and hamming it up, which is a shame. If you're going to go for something chintsy you should at least have fun with the ornate decorations.

2023-12-10

I haven't been playing much besides my gachas for the last two months or so. At some point in there though I played Slay the Princess. It's been doing the rounds and picking up steam since it came out, and it's neat enough. It's a short ren'py game with a lot of branching paths. I don't have much else to say about it.

I played a good chunk of Shadows over Loathing somewhere in the middle of November. It's another Loathing game. If you've played one of Asymmetric's other games you get the gist of it. It's like West of Loathing but set in the 1920s instead. Stick figures wander around little diorama sets drawn in pen and the areas are crammed full of jokes and puns and wordplay. It's not doing anything dramatically different than what they were doing before, but what they were doing before worked fine, and this is just more of that with a roaring 20s theme to it. I like wandering around the little dioramaa sets and reading reams upon reams of jokes. It's good.

The fan translation for Fate/Extra CCC released a couple days ago and I've been playing a bunch of that. I've been sort of aware of its reputation and for a while I've been joking that it's the other best place to start getting into Fate, in the sense that there are two ends to the spectrum of what you can expect from Fate. On the one end is something relatively grounded like Samurai Remnant, and on the far other end is CCC. Fate/Extra CCC is schlock. It's like a pulp sci-fi novel, where in-between a fantastical and weird setting lie all of the author's fetishes. It is unrestrained, for better or worse. Maybe if I try to summarize the plot as I've seen it so far the specific kind of pulpy schlock I'm trying to hit at might make more sense. In the middle of a battle for control of the wish-granting supercomputer on the moon, an AI goes rogue and kills most of the participants, and the survivors regroup on the far side of the moon with the help of an identical model non-rogue AI, where they're trapped unless they can find a way through the maze that the rogue AI made and controls. Said rogue AI placed a bunch of locks in the way, tied to figuring out the secret desires of the women that were involved in the fighting. Sure, alright, it's a setup that emphasizes more of a longer-form study of the characters, and it's a bit uncomfortable going through it because they had pretty solid reasons for not wanting people to find out the things you need to find out about them to progress the game. It's interesting, but if I fall back into more casual writing I'd just call it unhinged or maximum anime or something because the shorthand is easier than trying to actually explain it.

2023-10-12

for the last few days I've been playing various formats on Pokemon Showdown. I played random battles at first to start trying to get a bit more used to the flow of PVP, and when I got over the initial hump there and hit a rating around 1300 on the current gen ladder (currently lower because that's just how randbats goes sometimes), I started looking into some of the other formats. OU and UU don't really interest me that much so I gave NU a shot and got bodied there, and then I gave RU a shot because I can use Gardevoir and Slowbro and Mimikyu and they're good there, and I'm still getting bodied but not as hard as I was getting bodied in NU, and I like looking at the funny pink beach dude and Revavroom more than I like looking at Rotom-Mow and Jolteon. The main thing that's annoying about the lower tiers is that there's not really any current sample teams to just plug and play with and it takes longer to get a match.

2023-10-09

went through disgaea 7. it's another disgaea game. they've iterated on the mechanics a bit more and it's easier than ever to breeze through the main game. the maps seem larger than usual and I ended up running characters with three pairs of boots to make it feel more reasonable. the gacha they've added to the hospital in conjunction with the evility scrolls cracks the game wide open, and the changes to healer xp means that just chucking the healer and 8 other units in a corner with a bunch of xp boosters (triple xp from the dark assembly, extra xp from the cheat shop, pirilika's and the sea angel's party xp boosting evilities) is the best way to level early game, since there's not really anything too much better than getting 11 levels or so a turn for doing basically nothing. I forgot that I already did a writeup of what and how below.

story-wise disgaea 7's pretty good. It's not doing anything too unique for the series, but what it's doing it's doing well. All the plot beats hit the way they're supposed to and the cast, while not at the levels of some of my favorite characters in other entries (like valvatorez and his posse of losers from disgaea 4), are all well executed and likable enough. Fuji's a good male tsundere, Pirilika's an enthusiastic weeaboo, Seefour likes explosions, Yeyasu is a massive loser, and then Higan and Suisen are a bit weaker, but I can definitely remember a lot more of the cast in 7 offhand than I can for 6 (there was, uh, zed, and his sister, and the red ranger with a plugsuit, and the king? i do not remember their names). on the whole though i think disgaea 7's probably one of the better entry points into the series. most of the rough edges have been smoothed out and it all works together pretty well. i still think disgaea 4 complete is probably the best package overall, but if anyone's asking me about disgaea in the future I'll probably just point them to Disgaea 7.

I've continued working my way through Umineko no Naku Koro ni Chiru and got through with episode 7 last night. There's a lot going on with it, but as far as the umineko likers tell me episode 7 is as much explanation as I'll get. The culprit's situation is deeply fucked, the Ushiromiyas are monsters, the riddle's solution is deeply mean, but also a lot shorter than I thought it'd be, and then there's a ton of really clever narrative sleight-of-hand. I think I can see why the game would annihilate the brain of someone who played it at a more formative age. I've still got another chapter to get through but I'm not expecting it to tell me anything I don't already know. Seems like it's just there to close things out and ask you what you thought of the themes.

I played a bit of Void Stranger, up through the first interlude. I don't play many sokoban-likes, but it seems like there's some meat on it and probably a good story if I would get deeper into it.

Fate/Samurai Remnant came out. I'm not totally sure what people were expecting out of it, but it's not quite a full musou and not quite a strict action game. From the reactions I've been hearing online it seems like people weren't expecting a type-moon game to be mostly text occasionally broken up by a bit of gameplay, which is just bad pattern recognition imo. It seems like it'll be probably one of the most straightforward holy grail wars to get people an easier on-boarding point into fate things than the bad musous or one of the RPGs that wasn't localized, or the VN that never came over. I'm having a decent time with it so far.

I played a bit of Spirit Hunter: Death Mark. It seems neat. It's a story that seems like it's ended up on the horror side of the horror/mystery split. People get the titular death mark and then find themselves drawn to a mansion with a talking doll dressed in gothic fashion. If they don't figure out a way to break the curse before the morning, they die. I didn't get much further than that, since it seems like you can't just save and reload whenever, and can only do so at fixed points. It's probably to enhance the horror and make decisions feel more impactful or something, since Experience's dungeon crawlers will just let you save whenever you want. I'll probably get back to it at some point, it seems neat. I guess October's as good a time as any to get back to it and Paranormasight, get the spooky games in.

2023-09-22

played some more armored core 6. got through chapter 2. it's still solid

played through the Disgaea 7 demo, and got one of my units up to 9999. the long and short of the grinding strategy in the demo is as follows:
- HL: roll the gacha with the points you get from healing party members. throwing the armor knight in 1-5 into the base makes this easy.
- mana: use the evility scrolls you get from rolling the gacha on the unit you want to gain mana, then convert them to mana at the evility shop.
- xp: pirilika gets an evility that boosts the exp gain of adjacent units at somewhere in the level 25-30 range. grind her up to level 30 by pressing magic wall in the +1 attack geo tile zone in 2-2 and then make scrolls of that evility and pass it around to other party members. boost the range of the magic wall skill (or some other buffing skill) on either pirilika or a healer as much as you can, put some exp boosting evilities on your unit that you're planning to level, then pass a triple exp bill by paying off the senators. head back over to 2-2, throw the +1 attack geo effect onto the geo panels, arrange your units in a 3x3 grid around the unit, and then press magic wall for seven hours. there will probably be a better way when the full game comes out in a bit over a week, but having a unit at 9999 means I can now just make generics at 7999 and just waltz through the rest of the game now. I also changed the character's class a few times while I was grinding it out so now I have all the generics that are available as of the demo at a minimum of rank 5. The videos I was looking at recommended using a nekomata to make it go a little bit faster since they get an extra attack when they're under 10% HP, but it didn't seem like it sped the process up all that much in the end.

Mon-Yu: Defeat Monsters And Gain Strong Weapons And Armor. You May Be Defeated, But Don't Give Up. Become Stronger. I Believe There Will Be A Day When The Heroes Defeat The Devil King is a game that one of my friends kept mentioning, and I nearly wrote it off as one of those kind of lower-rung Nippon Ichi games until they said it was by Experience, which took me from "maybe i'll think about looking into it next month" to "gotta buy it and get my dungeon crawler fix". It seems like Experience is continuing to improve and refine their dungeon crawler formula, and this one seems as good as ever. I'm about one demon king in right now. Not sure if it's going to turn out as good as Undernauts yet, but it seems solid.

It does have the problem that a lot of the games in the genre have though, where it's really annoying to reroll the bonus stats for a good number when you're creating a character. thankfully, i found out how to get the hidden good bonus starting stats (use a cheat engine-like on the steam deck), using a secret method that has been hitherto unknown (memory deck from the decky plugin )

2023-09-09

played some more armored core 6. i cleared out a few missions and got through the end of chapter 1. can't think of anything to say about it right now.

been playing some strip mahjong fangames by splushwave. normally I wouldn't think much of mahjong games, but the ones this company makes have gone and bolted an entire RPG to the side of it and made the mahjong play itself if you want it to. It ends up creating a pretty similar kind of mood to what I get out of gacha games on auto mode. it's compelling in a way I wasn't expecting it to be, and I've ended up losing a couple full days to them so far. the main annoying thing about them is that getting textractor to read the text initially is fiddly and it doesn't capture any of the menu text when i do get it working, so I have to actually read the japanese and try and remember the absolute nonsense that spells are named in dragon quest on jp or try and remember that the dot skills in fgo are 呪い, 毒状態, and やけど, because for some reason the dot skills in their fgo mahjong game affect the enemy's life points directly and so servants that can inflict those on the regular like serenity (in game 1) or baobhan sith (in the append disc) are insanely busted. the dot skills in the fgo one makes the games less about actually doing well in mahjong and makes it more about using fgo knowledge to loop your main DPS's NP a bunch and maximize the amount of dot damage the enemy's taking. it's an approach that's just really weird and, as such, is more compelling to me because I haven't seen anything like it before. maybe i should dig deeper into mahjong games, see if anything else is like this.

2023-08-29

Over the last few days I've been playing some of the Armored Core games.

Armored Core 1 is neat and I like the mood the game has where I am constantly struggling to get even the barest minimum of upgrades for my mech. It's grimy and tells of a tough world where making progress is tough. I'm sure there's ways around it but I've been having some success by just getting the large magazine machine gun and just eating the ammo costs since it's pretty reliable for the price. I'm about 17 missions in.

Armored Core 2 was very similar until I scraped together the money to buy the grenade rifle and then proceeded to laugh my way up the arena to get the money to play around with building whatever mech I felt like. However, in doing this I got pretty lazy and wasn't really using my full toolset in the way I think the game expects, which led to me getting walled in the mission where Strung takes you out to a desert with no radio with the promise of advance payment, since that was basically a normal mission followed immediately by an arena fight, so I had to actually learn to use my missiles instead of just relying on my gun. I think I'm about 22 missions in right now.

Armored Core 6 is a different game by comparison. Moving around is easy, getting money is easy, and getting the tools to mess around with your mech happens a lot sooner. If something's troublesome you don't have to start the mission over from the beginning and it gives you checkpoints like candy. I'll probably get walled soon since I've played like five missions of it but this doesn't seem too bad so far, especially not after piloting the much more cumbersome mechs of the early games.

2023-08-08

in another 'game i was inevitably bound to play that i have started playing' news, I have ended up starting Muv-Luv Extra today. I'll do a live play of it for my friends on discord, but dunno if it's worth it to cross-post here.

2023-08-05

I was reading some of Joe Wintergreen's posts today, and saw that he worked on InFlux, a game that I've had sitting in my Steam library for who knows how long, while I was looking over his Youtube page. So I booted it up and played it for an hour or so. InFlux seems like a perfectly competent marble-rolling puzzle game. It feels very TIGSource-core. You've got a limited, basic set of verbs (roll, push, pull, boost) and then the game introduces and then plays with that verb set through levels designed to teach you how mechanics work one at a time with minimal explicit tutorializing. It's enjoyable enough for what it is, even if it does play it very safe with its approach and ends up feeling a bit textbook as a result. Rolling the marble around and making it ramp off halfpipes is fun as a basic verb though and they don't try to get in the way of that core when you're just rolling the ball around between the puzzle levels.

2023-08-04

Oh whoops, fell off of this for a couple weeks. Mostly since I haven't played much of anything for more than a few minutes, and the one game I did play for like two hours (Trails) I've got off in a page I haven't published since I want to finish one of those games before I commit to anything more, as Trails, at a ballpark, as a whole, would take more time to finish than FF14 up through Endwalker. What I have been playing is Yeah, You Want "Those Games", Right? So Here You Go! Now Let's See You Clear Them!. It is exactly what it says on the tin. It's a collection of mobile game ad games. Pull the pin, math tower, fluid matching, and money run. "Those games" are exactly what they seem to be, and are about as challenging as you'd expect them to be. Compared against the pull the pin game I downloaded on my iPad a while back to find out, this is just the pure experience of what is advertised, and doesn't have any of the well-oiled ad-serving machinery that I'd encounter in the real versions of these games. It's neat.

I played a little bit of The Pale City, which seems to be a sort of cthonian RPG maker game. It's got a cool mood to it, but I didn't get very far into it.

Today I picked up QUESTER, and it has the sort of aesthetic sensibilities of a DOS or PC-98 game, just gussied up a bit to take advantage of new hardware being able to display more graphics at a time, while keeping the minimalist no-animation grid-based movement. I haven't played enough of it to say much more than that. It seems neat, but has a little bit of friction to it and I'm not as used to trying to get into games with friction in their design as I used to be, so it'll probably take a bit of adjusting for it to click.

While I was waiting for a late-night stream I played a round of Lumines Remastered. Lumines is still my go-to mindless puzzle game, and I like it a little bit more than Tetris. A while back I was so enamored with Lumines that I made my own rough prototype of a Lumines clone since I wanted to see what it'd look like if it had all the tetrominoes instead of just the squares. It didn't turn out very well, and I guess that's why they just went with the one shape for their game board, and why they made it as wide as they did too.

2023-07-23

For the last few days I've been playing Pokémon Sleep. As games go I think it's one of those games that most clearly encapsulates current design trends. What would, in any other point in time just be an alarm clock and maybe a sleep tracker with a Pokémon skin to promote the brand has been upgraded into a glorified Fitbit app that has a $10/month battle pass and various RPG elements for some reason. It's a curious experience. The normal game style of introducing new elements after the main loop finishes once creates a lot more friction when the main loop of the game is "going to sleep", and the time for a tutorial is when you're barely awake.

Well, it finally happened. Cry, scream, insist you'll never play it, come up with every excuse in the book, Falcom does not care. The unceasing release schedule means that, sometime, somehow, eventually, if you play turn-based RPGs, you will eventually, through no fault of your own, end up booting The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky FC. Trails: you're going to play it some day. And for me that day is today. Additionally, on booting it up I was contacted by an old friend who demanded my opinions on it, so I guess I'm obliged to go and write up a dedicated play log for it.

2023-07-19:

played a bit more of Monster Attack. After fighting off off-brand tripods in missions 7-9, mission 10 introduced legally distinct Godzilla, who has a nasty breath weapon that took out the tank I was in very quickly.

played through Monuments to Guilt, by Louis, after it popped up on my Cohost feed. It makes its case clearly enough, and I think the most clear point it makes is to just walk back to the start of the exhibit after looking at all the hostile benches and watching the slideshow of all of them and just note that, man, that first bench sure is nice. I'd sit in that first bench.

2023-07-15:

Went looking around for what the earlier EDF games were called and found that EDF 1 was localized as Monster Attack, and EDF 2 is Global Defense Force. I started playing Monster Attack and it's about what I remember from the time I dug through the Superlite 1XXX series of games in an ISO list and found some game that sounded cool called Chikyuu Boeigun, which turns out to be the Japanese title for the EDF games. EDF 1 opts for a tank control sort of scheme and automatically raises and lowers the gun to the level a monster is at. There aren't any civilians screaming or any of that hammy voice acting where they yell "Oh no! They got Frank! And next they're going to get me!", and they don't sing songs to the tune of John Brown's Body like they do in later games. What I've seen so far though seems like it has all the same bones as the later EDFs. I'm planning on going through all the mainline EDFs, so I should probably make an LP page for it.

2023-07-14:

I looked up reviews for Exoprimal to see if, hope against hope, that they had changed anything at the last minute and pulled back on their bad online only mentality and they have not. Because they opted not to make their game 'EDF but with dinosaurs', I decided to go and pick up Earth Defense Force 5 over on Steam, and let my mind smooth over as I mow down thousands upon thousands of those goddammned bugs that are trying to invade the Earth. After playing through about 13 missions something about the pacing clicked and I think I could see myself just picking up EDF for a bit, doing a mission, and then putting it down again every time I feel the need to fidget and feel like I'm doing something. This feels like potentially excellent progress in my attempt to find a way to stop my gacha gambling problem if I can make it stick.

After finishing the Tsukihime remake I wanted to see all of the routes that weren't in that one, so I picked up Tsukihime and its various fan discs and put them on my Steam Deck. The tone of Tsukihime is a bit different than TsukiR and the presentation lacks the polish that their new game with big gacha money has, but that doesn't and shouldn't matter too much. The art isn't as airbrushed and the compositions are a bit weaker but none of it is bad by any stretch, so I'll probably just plug away at it right before I go to sleep for the next little while here. I'm thinking I'll mostly focus on the Far Side routes since I'm told that the Ciel route only really diverges from the Arcueid route at the end and the Arc route in TsukiR seems mostly unchanged from what I remember of playing Tsukihime about a decade ago.

2023-07-10:

Played a bit more of Tsukihime - A Piece of Blue Glass Moon, and finished Ciel route normal. I'm still not totally sure what I think of it yet. Guess I'll have to put my impressions on the backburner until I see the true end. Where I am in the ciel true end route end seems like it's got a little bit more going on, the usual metaphorical fighting between the two heroines fighting over their shared love being represented a bit more literally as a no-holds barred fight as they make their way over to the person they both like, with ciel's protestations (here depicted with her shooting a .30 caliber gun) having no effect. Something to that effect anyway. Now, through the power of editing the page five hours later: I've finished the true end. still not totally sure how I feel about it. It's a pretty fun ride but I'm not totally sure where the back half of that fight fits in with a metaphorical reading of things.

2023-07-07:

played a bit of Touhou Makuka Sai ~ Fantastic Danmaku Festival part II. I continue to be bad at shmups but want to understand the appeal of the Touhous so I will keep periodically bashing my head against them until I understand. the game is a touhou fangame. it is a shmup. i do not have the necessary experience to distinguish between this and any other danmaku game.

2023-06-28

played through a decent chunk of SEQUEL kludge, the fourth game in the sequel series. it picks up the various threads that colony dropped in the back third about the machine continent and the unexplored zone at the south of the continent that colony takes place on. there's a decent little exploration system down there where doing various small tasks makes something on the map unlock. production-wise it's probably an excuse to mess around with MV's scripting system. they've implemented what looks like a bespoke map system that you can zoom out and see where you are, and it doesn't look like it's just the off-the-shelf one you get when you look up minimap plugins for rpg maker MV. at the very least it seems like hakika's customized it with unique sprites. the story continues in the same kind of mood as the rest of hakika's games, and I gel with that well enough so I'm more than happy to just wallow in the setting for a bit longer and see the story play out. it feels like this one and the last one keep pointing to another sequel game set in not-japan but there hasn't been anything on that front announced yet since hakika just released innocent rules a bit under two weeks ago.

2023-06-26

played SEQUEL colony. as porn game creators go, hakika is usually trying harder than most to make a real game. the closest point of comparison I have for the sort of style it's going for is something like a more self-serious, less restrained to heart 2 dungeon travelers 2. the balancing in sequel colony feels a bit more shaky than sequel blight or sequel awake, though that might just come from me not understanding how the brand system works. either way i got annoyed by it and hacked the stats up to see how the rest of the main story played out. it was solid enough, some story about a repressive state apparatus covering up the truth of its leadership while a researcher behind the scenes was trying to become immortal. it's some decent enough fantasy schlock.

2023-06-24:

-played star anise chronicles 1.5: where's twig after seeing a chost by its creator mentioning it in response to talking about how the pico-8 doom port is insane. It's a pretty charming and well-put-together little platformer. you play as a cat and gradually get the powers to meow to open doors, to swipe glasses off of platforms, and a horizontal teleport. it takes around, I dunno, 40 minutes to get through. the writing is about as expansive as you can reasonably get within the limits of PICO-8, which is to say it's pretty minimal and simple, but there's enough room to get a little bit of personality in there. It's not a big game by normal standards, but it's the most ambitious game I've played on a PICO-8 cartridge. It's neat!

played more final fantasy 16 and got up through the point where you can get a chocobo. I'd been noting that the map design had the same sort of feeling as ff14 where navigation on foot felt pretty slow, and wished that I could get a mount. I do wonder where the story's going with Clive struggling to liberate people and them not accepting him as a liberator as he wanders in with a swathe of destruction behind him.

2023-06-23:

played some more final fantasy 16, and can now see a bit more of what they're going for since I'm out of the intro and into more normal gameplay. got up to a little bit past where clive gets his limit break in the most kingdom hearts sequence i've seen outside of kingdom hearts. after pressing l3+r3 to accept the truth while his past ghost self watches and he fights dark clive inside his heart, clive gets into a kaiju fight with himself and wins. i am extremely glad that they have not just wallowed in the mood they had set in the opening.

2023-06-22:

suddenly got hit with the crushing weight of realizing that i'm nowhere near being able to do anything close to what i want to with my work life, and that i've whiled away most of my 20s for nothing, and feeling like if I don't make a change soon I'll be stuck in this rut forever, so I spent the day extremely lethargic. I dug out my old PSTV after a conversation set off by looking at the current state of Vita emulation and tried starting a tamamo run of fate/extra but didn't get more than a few minutes into it for the various reasons in the first sentence there.

2023-06-21:

final fantasy 16 released today, so i've naturally gone and picked it up. it seems like it's Final Fantasy: the HBO drama so far. I'm not a big fan of that kind of prestige TV aesthetic, but I'm not really who they're targeting with this one and I've been getting way more into Dragon Quest recently anyway. The action combat seems like the reasonable evolution of what Type-0 and FF15 and FF7R and stranger of paradise were going for. I think I'll probably end up preferring what stranger of paradise is going for over what 16's doing, just kind of going off initial story and combat impressions. It still feels pretty good to play and pressing buttons doesn't immediately repulse me like it did in FF15.

2023-06-18:

skipped through the arcueid route since I read that with the buggy MTL text hooker a few years back, got a couple chapters into Ciel's route

2023-06-17:

tsukihimates finished their translation patch for the tsukihime remake. nothing's getting done on here until i finish reading that. see you in a few days

2023-06-16:

- tried the exoprimal demo. regrettably, the number of dinosaurs on-screen at any given time was reasonable and did not cause the console to struggle under the weight of all the dinosaurs. there were no raptornados. the writing was not very campy. and then after fighting a bunch of dinosaurs there was some move the cube to the extraction point thing where you had to fight off raptors and the enemy team and it sucked. the game is not close enough to being the dinosaur EDF i was hoping it would be. And, sure, that's not necessarily what it's going for, but I am not interested in any execution of the game's concept that isn't 'EDF but with dinosaurs', so the further it gets from that the less I care about what it is.

- started playing Valkyrie Elysium. It seems a lot better than the initial impressions I heard gave it credit for. It seems like a really solidly put-together action game that feels good to move around and fight in, and the writing seems serviceable for what it's going for even if it's probably not what fans of Valkyrie Profile want. as spinoffs go this seems pretty respectable, with nice environments and good game feel. Maybe it'll wear thin by the end, but the bones here seem solid.

2023-06-12:

The Final Fantasy XVI demo dropped today, and it's pretty much everything I'd expect from a Naoki Yoshida production. Guy loves him some medieval fantasy and this Final Fantasy feels, writing-wise, more like Final Fantasy Tactics or Tactics Ogre than the rest of the mainline Final Fantasies.

2023-06-11:

played more ranked SF6 and remembered to record and upload the matches. I'm going to go and set up the page for it right after I hit save here.

2023-06-10:

played a bit more of world tour mode on SF6. I asked some other people about the ending of the story mode and they said the only difference was where you end up on the podium at the end there, and I can respect it.

2023-06-09:

Reached credits on the Street Fighter 6 single player. I ended up losing to Bosch at the end and getting what seems like the bad ending, though it's also a reasonable end to Bosch's character arc and the thematic question of "what is power". Understanding it just as violence invariably leads to destruction, the game seems to say, while also seeming to imply that there is a way to pursue power recreationally. Or at least, that's the initial impression I get. Another reading might ask me to reconsider the premise of power as mere violence, or any host of other decently interesting questions that I'm not entirely sure are the reading I'm supposed to get out of it when I don't know what happens when I win the tournament against Bosch. Playing normally in that fight I think I'd lose, and winning would take either a lot more skill or using every tool in my arsenal to win. To use items and all that is to say to the game that you are willing to win at any cost, and it's to get an understanding of power not as something which is fair, but as being willing to stoop to doing anything to win. In that scenario there is no such thing as cheating in combat, no such thing as being cheap, or being unfair. There is only playing to win, and under this view losing is not an option. It's kind of interesting to contrast this, which is pretty clearly the view that Bosch is supposed to represent, with what happens when he wins, which is that he dies. In doing everything to win, he reaches ruin. There's something weird there, which means there's more to it than that, and some part I'm not thinking about, but I've written all I want to about it for now.

2023-06-08:

Played some more Street Fighter 6. Over on ranked I hit rookie 3, and I'm doing a little bit better at using my options. Guiles are kicking my ass though, I think I need to learn what he's doing more. In the story mode I found the island with a bunch of level 50 enemies and I've been using that to powerlevel a bit. I should probably upgrade street fighter to a real page since i've played it for more than a couple of hours across a few days now.

2023-06-07:

decided to give DJMax Respect another shot and dug out my old fightstick to get an experience more in line with the way the buttons appear on screen. I probably need to replace some buttons or cables on it since it's dropping inputs a lot, or buy a hitbox to replace it, but initial results feel promising.

2023-06-05:

played a bit of corru.observer. it feels like an interesting evolution of the sort of multimedia approach that old flash games used to have. It looks very cool but it's hard to play in longer stretches. so far I've gotten two scenes into the memory of the embassy.

played a few minutes of Torchlight to see if my opinion on top-down diablo-style games has changed. it has not. it plays okay but not enough for me to want to spend the sort of time on it that it's asking for.

2023-06-04:

- played a few rounds of street fighter 6 online. I mostly got bodied and need to spend more time just learning what all the characters can do, as well as play better in neutral and remember to use a couple of the autocombos every now and then.

- picked up Lunacid and played it for about 5 hours straight. It's a really well-done first-person action dungeon crawler in the King's Field vein.

played about 20 minutes of Golf With Your Friends, and then promptly refunded it because I didn't like how it felt to play.

2023-06-03:

played some more street fighter 6. I went online and went like 3-12 in novice 1 ranked. the single-player mode is still neat, but it'll probably wear out its welcome by the end.

2023-06-02:

-Street Fighter 6 came out today. It's Street Fighter. It's pretty solid. I'm probably not going to be doing anything else today.

- i lie, i picked up a gacha for a few minutes and gave 404 Game Re:Set the briefest of tries. yoko taro has a bad track record with gacha games and this one continues that trend. gameplay-wise it's a mediocre shmup in the vein of an azur lane. gacha-wise, it's split into a character gacha and an equipment gacha. the equipment gacha is a bunch of little sega figurines. that's cute and kind of charming, but not charming enough to make me not want to drop the game.

2023-05-31:

- played a few minutes of DJMax Respect on my computer and boy does that game not play well with proton. I was getting downwards of 20 FPS and refunded it pretty much immediately because that's just not playable at all.
- gave the demo for Astlibra Revision a shot. it felt pretty good, kind of like a more responsive version of fortune summoners.
-I've gone and booted up Outer Wilds for the first time in a few years, since I saw a post that reminded me I never picked up the DLC. Here's a log of my time with the Outer Wilds DLC:
Attempt 1: The menu tells me that there's a new exhibit in the museum. I head over to the museum and wonder where the new exhibit could be until I see the sign that says 'new exhibit'. It talks about the mapping probe, so I head over to it. I crash into it, and I find nothing. I wander around the solar system a bit until I end the cycle on the white dwarf station.
Attempt 2: I go to the mapping probe again and remember how to use the radio. This gives me the deep space channel, and it shows a signal back at Timber Hearth. I head back there, and then wander around the oceanic vents until the sun explodes.
Attempt 3: I find the source of the other signal on Timber Hollow at the radio observatory. Inside the building it shows a picture of an astronaut on an image with a readout that says 137 degrees below it. I follow the map pod to 137 degrees and find nothing. I restart.
Attempt 4: I double-check the radio tower picture and it sure does say 137 degrees. I return to 137 degrees and find nothing. I wander around the solar system a bit more and decide to follow the radio for an entire cycle next time.
Attempt 5: I beeline to the radio emitter and align my flight trajectory with it starting somewhere around 22 degrees. I subtract 137 from 360 and wonder if I'll see anything at 223 degrees. I do not. I crash into the emitter somewhere around a readout of 270 degrees. I did not see anything interesting while following it. I'm out of leads at this point so I put the game down for now.

2023-05-29:

- played chapter 5 of sword and fairy 7. it has a card game. i will update the page later.
- played a chapter of liar princess and the blind prince. I might start a page for this one. I've been meaning to see it through to the end for years and need a good excuse to do so.

2023-05-28:

got my new capture card in and updated its firmware, and then played a bit more sword and fairy 7. gonna try an old approach where I just record the game first and then pick out the screenshots and do the writeup later, as opposed to what I've been doing so far, which is to do the writeup as I play it. kind of a coinflip which approach lets me be lazier about this, but I'm going to play it by ear.
-played a bit of r4: ridge racer 4. the aesthetic seems comparatively easy to replicate in html so i might try and do something with that.

2023-05-26:

played some of myhouse.wad. it's neat but i am very bad at doom. it's also been documented extensively elsewhere so there's not a whole lot of point talking about it here.

2023-05-21:

- booted up fate/extra ccc to see if I could use text hooking and MTL to get through it and ran into the same problem I did last time where the ADV segments and the VN segments didn't play nice with each other, so I stopped, and will go back to waiting for iwakura's team to make any progress on editing their translation patch again.
-played a few more minutes of minstrel song. i found some treasure chests in a cave.

2023-05-20:

ordered a new capture card because I finally got fed up with how finnicky the blackmagic intensity pro is. here's my review of the blackmagic intensity pro: it works half the time if I'm lucky, as long as I only open OBS once. I have to know exactly whether a console outputs at 720p60 (nintendo consoles do this) or 720p59.98 (playstation consoles do this), so you need to know that for table stakes before you can even diagnose if it's just not working because the daemon failed to initialize or got held up by some other process or something. it will output audio sometimes, and depending on the phase of the moon it's a coinflip between whether the audio outputs correctly or has been pitch-shifted in some bizarre way. the software is useless and takes up unnecessary space on my computer. if i try to open up obs a second time or even just put the console to sleep and turn it back on a minute later the audio just gets lost. when it's working, it works great. however most of the time it is not working and it makes capturing footage more of a chore than it needs to be. i have been using this thing on the regular for about eight years and i despise it.

2023-05-19:

- picked up persona 3: dancing in moonlight and played it for a bit. the remixes are solid, and the rhythm game is fine once you get into the rhythm of it. the writing makes me wonder if I've just aged out of persona, and I probably have.
- played another few minutes of SaGa minstrel song, but I'm just not in the right headspace for it.
- tried the demo forMonster Menu The Scavenger's Cookbook. seems like a pretty reasonable evolution of mystery dungeons. take out the strict 'everything moves on the grid at the same time' bit, add in nippon ichi's usual SRPG combat, expand on the hunger system a bit by adding a cooking menu. seems fine, I'll probably pick it up around when it comes out if I get far enough into the demo to hit the end of it.

2023-05-15:

got stuck at the car dealership while waiting for some way overdue maintenance and decided to look through some of the other translated PC-98 games. I booted up Brandish 2 since I remember liking Brandish 1 a lot when I played it on the Vita some years back. So far I've figured out that I can pick up items with PgDn and equip them by clicking on the Equip button and dragging them to the equip slots. I found a manual for it hosted over on Gaming Alexandria, though it's untranslated so I've gotta bumble through it with my extremely bad Japanese. I've additionally found that I can look at things with PgUp, and I can open doors by right clicking the mouse to set the cursor into object interact mode represented by a hand, which lets me open doors if they're unlocked.

2023-05-13:

-looked through my ps4 library and decided to boot up Metrico+. it feels very of the 2010s. the aesthetic is minimalist and the explanations are nonexistent. it feels like the devs watched the egoraptor video on megaman about how good design is when the game doesn't have to tell you how to play and took it to the conclusion that a lot of the devs did in the 2010s that you shouldn't explain mechanics or have tutorials without noticing that egoraptor's analysis was off-base insofar as it didn't take note of the fact that games would have come with a manual that explained how those games worked, and reading the manual was part of playing the games back then. sure, you can figure it out without it, and that's the point of the video, but you should have some way of just telling players about what the mechanics of the game are because they might not be familiar with the lingua franca of video games and the various visual cues. booting up a game without access to the manual is more of a recent phenomenon that came with the shift to digital games, where you can't really package a manual for people to read while the game installs in the same way as a physical package. ranting about 2010s design trends aside it's an alright puzzle game. most of the puzzle is just figuring out what you're looking at and what's doing what where. it looks neat. wouldn't go out of my way to recommend it but it's competent enough at what it's doing.
-downloaded wordscapes on my phone. like other casual phone games in this area, this is mainly a vehicle to show you ads and push microtransactions with all the latest thought in mobile game player retention clutter. this isn't as extremely aggressive about adding ever more timers and puzzle pieces and competitions and upgrade trees as the pull the pin game I downloaded on iOS a few months back, it's just most of the way there. final review: i feel my grey cells dying in real time out of ten.

2023-05-12:

-picked up judgement for about 20 minutes. it's still okay but I wasn't really in the mood for it. kind of want to just skip to lost judgement.
-picked up stranger of paradise: final fantasy origin for a bit and then got walled by tiamat. stranger of paradise continues to be extremely good.
-booted up stranger of sword city to give it a shot. this is Experience's first dungeon crawler as far as I remember, and it's so much rougher than their other ones. play undernauts instead.

2023-05-11:

had to get up early for a three hour meeting at work and had nothing in the tank after I got home so I just booted up Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line and listened to some music from the music department at square enix goya. i have no thoughts on it (positive). head empty, press button. ff14 music is probably the best of the modern FFs, SaGa's music is so much better than I expected.

-Immediately after posting that last line I thought "dang, I want to play some SaGa", so I picked up Romancing SaGa Minstrel Song. Might start a diary on this one as a text log and upload it if I keep playing over the next few days.

2023-05-07:

-booted up disaster report 4 for the first time in three years, and got past the extremely out-of-place segment where you join, recruit for, and then become the leader of a cult and back into the regular game and got a bit of the way through the next segment where you try and help an injured old lady to a hospital.
-decided to try fear & hunger: termina. this one's interesting. i should keep a running diary about it. gone and made a page for it here

2023-05-06:

started playing digimon survive. haven't gotten far enough in to get any solid impressions yet

2023-05-05:

-tried cassette beasts this morning and refunded it after around an hour. Maybe if I were in a different kind of mood I'd gel with it a bit more, but-- I dunno, I just don't really like the kind of indie rock sound the overworld theme is going for in general, and I'm just tired of this genre of '90s retro pastiche as an aesthetic. It was kind of interesting when Gone Home did it, but Gone Home was ten years ago, and it's gotten more tired as the last decade's worn on, and I never really jived with other things aiming at this kind of general area like Life is Strange. it's not an aesthetic I want to get more of. There's almost certainly a solid game in there, I'm just not the person to go digging for it.

-picked up final fantasy 3, since it's pretty much the last one I haven't looked into before. i guess they saw the class system in dragon quest 3 and went 'what if you could change your classes whenever without needing to go to the temple of dharma' and tried to figure out what possibilities they could wring out of that. seems about as solid as final fantasies usually are.

-reinstalled control to try and see why i uninstalled it a few years back. i couldn't figure out who i needed to talk to to advance the game state and then tried moving around the character and shooting the gun. I then remembered how it felt to play and it was just so bland that i ended up uninstalling it again. it's like if lobotomy corporation were made by hollywood, without most of the things that made lobotomy corp interesting.