@“Funbil”#p50324 Still slowly making my way through Breath of Fire III! The game feels like it‘s quickly coming to a close, so I’ll save my full thoughts until I beat it (expect to see this summation post in maybe a week or so). However, just as I happen to be listening to a podcast talking about the world famous Corona Virus (which may or may not have been mentioned for half a second on this week's Insert Credit bonus episode), Breath of Fire III has me walking through an area called the “Desert of Death.” Just wanted to share with everyone that any future playthrough of this part of the game will now always remind me of America circa 202X.
Since I am in the heart of NYC and rapid tests are basically unavailable, I sat out Xmas. But now I have a nice memory of beating Panic! start to finish in one sitting. The jokes don‘t really hold up, but the sprite work is still amazing. Played for about 4 hours before I broke down and looked at Ray Barnhold’s guide on Gamefaqs.
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I let myself get sucked into Echo, a sci-fi stealth-action horror game by defunct Danish developer Ultra Ultra. I‘m very into it so far and love how it looks and especially sounds. I’ve avoided story spoilers but I knew ahead of time the gameplay gimmick and kind of wish I hadn't because the way it unfolds for the main character could have been fun to figure out alongside her in a completely blind playthrough.
There is a whole lot of exposition delivered by Rose Leslie and Nick Boulton who don't seem totally like they're playing off each other but a behind the scenes video made it look like they could have recorded their lines together, so who knows.
Also: I like when a game can stick to a setting/aesthetic instead of cycling between themed dungeons but we'll see how I feel about that by the time I'm done!
echo is a cool experience for sure
Last night I played Bear's Restaurant after hearing Yoshiro Kimura talk about it with the game‘s creator (Part 1, Part 2). The way they had talked about it made it seem like a pretty competent title, able to be mentioned in the same breath as moon: Remix RPG Adventure and UNDERTALE. It’s on sale now for 10% off, which isn't terribly much, but it was enough to catch my attention in a mood to spend money after getting a few gift cards for Christmas. I figured $11.69 was a pretty good price for something that very well may wind up being my game of the year.
Have you ever had a friend who would say stuff like "Some day I'm gonna make a game, and it's gonna be like X and Y and have themes of A, B, and C," and just listening to this idea, you can tell it's wildly unfocused, without an original bone in its body, and would absolutely not make a good game, but you patiently listen to them talk about it anyways because you know this person also definitely does *not* have the skill or motivation to actually finish making an entire video game? _Bear's Restaurant_ is what happens when someone like this actually does make that game they're talking about. Here's a game that really loves the idea of tragedy and empathy, but doesn't really know how to express that, and doesn't understand why games that express them do so in the first place.
The central conceit of _Bear's Restaurant_ (for a while) is a restaurant run by a Bear in the afterlife. People die, and they show up at this restaurant to eat something. It's always vague if this is some kind of "cutting earthly ties" situation, or if they're being consoled after dying, or anything else along these lines. _Bear's Restaurant_ seems to like all these ideas equally and uses them interchangeably for the needs of whatever particular mini-narrative is happening. You play as a cat (for a while) who works at this restaurant, taking orders and having the bear prepare the meals. Within the first few customers I was already really confused by the tone of the game - the way I've described things so far makes it seem like a gentle, sensitive game about the beauty of human life, right? You can tell it's really trying to be like this... But for some reason, the bear and the cat are really judgemental!! The voice the author uses to characterize these two is weirdly aggressive and bitter, which is definitely supposed to be a joke but makes it incredibly difficult to get too invested in anything. This is a gigantic issue that permeates the entire game. The author is definitely a sarcastic type of guy, and therefore any and all "humor" in this game comes from people being just a little too rude to each other. The biggest mistake here is that the game tries to be "funny" like this almost more often than it tries to be anything else. It's a flavor that does not compliment the crux of this story at all.
(_Bear's Restaurant_ has a content warning at around this time in the game, except it doesn't really explain what the warning is for. I'll similarly put a warning here, but actually list what's mentioned: references to car accidents, suicide, assault, and gang violence.)
Playing as the cat waiter, sometimes a customer's order is too vague, so you'll have to dive into their memories of when they were alive to see what exactly they want. There is not a single one of these "dive" stories that are handled with any tact or honesty at all. Every one is a cartoonishly exaggerated caricature of what someone who has no real experience with death assumes dying is like. A pregnant woman who just finished eating dinner, goes outside, and... Randomly gets hit by a car. An old man sitting on a chair in his living room, hearing his wife say it's nearly time for dinner... All of a sudden has one or two dialogue boxes reflecting about how much his life has gone downhill, whips out a revolver the size of his head, and shoots himself? A man freed from jail after a 15-year sentence, only to be met by another old man with a huge gun that blasts him for seemingly no reason? The only black man in the game (who, by the way, talks with a really thick accent and your cat character is visibly afraid of him for no particular reason) at one moment is fishing by a river, and the next is being hunted down by some gang members only to be - one again! - shot to death? It's all so random and happens so quickly. In a game centralized on learning about other people's experiences, it does an absolutely horrible job of relaying any kind of real humanity. It's just a flipbook of buzzwords that someone who obviously doesn't have very many lived experiences thinks would make people say "Man, this is pretty heavy stuff."
This is when something almost interesting happens. I'm jumping forward a bit, but I promise you're not missing anything. There's eventually a little demon guy who shows up and starts eating everything, saying it's "hungry for despair." At first I rolled my eyes at yet more buzzwords that don't really mean anything, but then I thought about it a little more... Being "hungry for despair"... Isn't that the reason you'd play a game like this? I just wrote an entire paragraph about how disappointingly underdeveloped the tragedies are. On some level, that's really fucked up, right? That I'm looking at how all these people lost their lives, and saying "come on, this is ridiculous." I'm wanting something more, but in order to get that, I'd need to see longer stories about more tragedies that are actually rooted in some kind of reality similar enough to my own. How horrible!! I'm the demon hungry for despair! Now that's an interesting character to have in a game. I wonder if it goes anywhere?
It doesn't. The demon winds up being Flowey from _UNDERTALE_. Some lines taken nearly word-for-word from the end of that game (which I won't spoil for anyone who hasn't played it). It really is shameless how 1:1 this character is with Flowey. I cannot express enough how much they are perfectly identical. I was willing to give this the benefit of the doubt and maybe Daigo and Toby Fox just happened to have similar ideas, but in that Yoshiro Kimura talk and even in _Bear's Restaurant_ itself, _inside of the game_, Daigo mentions how much of an influence _UNDERTALE_ was. He even goes as far as to say how annoyed he is by how many imitators have been popping up. Hm...
Anyways, I could go on, but everything else I don't like in this game all stems from these same issues I've mentioned here. Just a tactless game that doesn't really seem to understand why games like _moon_ or _UNDERTALE_ work the way they do. Someone said "I'm gonna make a game like _moon: Remix RPG Adventure_ and _UNDERTALE_, and it'll have themes about death, humanity, and empathy," but unlike the thousands of games like this people say they will make, this one actually got made. To nobody's surprise, it's not good.
Oh! And also there's a part when you go to hell and all the people going there are visibly impoverished. That sucks!
I think I‘m done with Death Stranding for now. I ended up building lots of roads, and then in the last few hours just throwing up ziplines with reckless abandon so I could easily 5 star a couple of cities/waystations/whatever and get some gear for my trouble. I fell over more times in the last couple hours of play than in the whole rest of my time with the game, because I had the >!jetpack & a speed skeleton!< and was just trying to move around as quickly as possible, exploring a couple parts of the map I’d neglected up til then. All up I spent 87 hours with this game according to my profile. Considering I picked up the disc on deep discount a while back and didn't play it til I bought the PS5 upgrade, all this entertainment ended up costing me less than 50 australian cents an hour. Wow!
In other news, I got the Demon's Souls remake for xmas. Looking forward to it very much.
I‘ve been tooling around a bit with Disgaea 6 while traveling, and yep, it sure is Disgaea. It’s a great pick up and play game for this time of year, I think this one in particular does a lot to make it more beginner friendly. Personally I don't mind the switch to 3D models as much as some people, but I do think the 2D has a little more charm to it.
The auto-battle feature feels undercooked. I actually think Disgaea would be a great series to design Auto Chess or Super Auto Pets-style spinoff or mode designed around building a team composition and having them automatically fight. But the way it's implemented is basically just to automate EXP grind. Here it feels kind of mobile gamey. Could be why they made this a Switch exclusive even though a PS4 version released in Japan.
back at it again at krispy kreme etc etc
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@“Funbil”#p50324
Finally finished Breath of Fire III! Glad to report I really turned around on this game. I wouldn‘t call it a new favorite (I can’t help but compare it to Wild Arms, which I also played for the first time this year - in all aspects but visual, I would consider that a much better game (which I can‘t tell if this is a hot take or not)), but I’m ready to officially advocate for it as a Damn Good Game.
The complaints I initially had with _Breath of Fire III_ I think are still valid, though as the game progresses, it becomes a lot easier to forgive since it starts picking up in a lot of other areas. One of the biggest issues I had was that the narrative felt childish and inconsequential, which I suspected was on purpose once I realized there was a time skip going from childhood to adulthood. Having now finished the game, yes, it's definitely on purpose. The time skip itself is handled pretty weakly (all of a sudden introducing several majorly plot-relevant elements all at the same time and expecting you to immediately be on board with how important everyone's saying it all is), but once that's out of the way, _Breath of Fire III_ starts playing around with some truly interesting concepts in a surprisingly thoughtful way. Contrasting this against the comparatively juvenile pre-time skip segments, I often found myself thinking things like "Man, it's amazing to think the people I'm seeing here are those same kids that got up to all those hi-jinx when they were little." This is something a lot of media - not just games - tries to accomplish, but this is the only time it really resonated with me the way it's supposed to. The way it starts equating gods and machines also got me thinking about quite a few things, applying both to real life as well as to fictional settings, but it started taking it in a different direction than what I was envisioning - good thing it's post-2017 and we have _NieR: Automata_! There's some real clever metaphors in this game though, intentional or not, and it often finds ways to start applying several layers of metaphor to each other. I suppose that this is the bright side of a localized PS1 RPG using vague language - whether or not it's what the Japanese script intended, you can start extracting some pretty poignant stuff if you're looking for it!
Unfortunately, my problems with the dungeon layouts and battles never quite got resolved. They remain pretty bland all throughout, though at least swapping out party members allows you to start thinking from different directions. A Rei/Peco build may as well be a totally different game compared to a Nina/Momo build. The issue there comes with how often it forces specific characters into your party for narrative reasons. It felt like half the dungeons required you to either be using Momo or Garr, both of which being the two characters I was the least interested in using (and no, the game forcing them on me did not wind up being clever design to start getting me to use characters I wouldn't normally use, it just kept reminding me how much I didn't want to use them). I think after a while, I did start getting a little more "in-the-head" of whoever was in charge of designing the dungeon maps. There is some kind of internal logic at play there, it's just not quite like other RPGs I've played. It's hard to tell if I consider this a negative because it's honestly bad or if it's just not what I'm used to. It still remains true, as of my initial _Breath of Fire III_ post, that there is not a single dungeon that I had a good time in.
In the end, the narrative pulled me in Big-Time, which if you've read my previous post, you'll know it had quite a lot of work to do in order to achieve this. Aside from the dungeon layouts, the entire game only continues to get better and better. The music and the art and the story all enter this chain of one-upping itself and it never stops until the game clear screen. There's a couple segments here and there that hurt the pacing a little (which I was warned about not just in this forum but also in my real life - seems like this is something the game is notorious for), though I never felt like it was anything particularly egregious. It'll toss in a few gimmicks here and there that might feel out-of-place, but in my opinion they never derail the focus strong enough or long enough to be that much of an issue (except for the Beyd stuff pre-time skip. That is the single worst part of the game, and very well may be the biggest reason I was initially so sour towards the game).
Among every RPG I've played in my life, I'd place this one solidly in B-tier. It's a perfect game for a kid growing up near the turn of the century when you only have a few games you pour your entire life into. Tons of secrets, a deep battle system you can get a lot out of if you're willing to put in the effort (and pretend like it's worth it to do so), relatively high-minded concepts expressed in very approachable ways... It really is the perfect game for someone like that, I can imagine it really shaping someone's worldview the way games like [_EarthBound_ did for me when I was young](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/1051-games-that-had-a-transformative-impact-in-your-life/2). For a twenty-something who's been around the block a few times though (admittedly not nearly as many times as I'd like), it's simply a Damn Good Game. 8/10 - and compared to my initial impressions, that's really saying something!!
Well, while I didn't get to about 10 other games I wanted to this year (Chicory, Inscryption, Unpacking, Neo: The World Ends With You, Ys IX, Cruelty Squad, etc.), I did beat Shin Megami Tensei V with enough time to squeeze one in, and I was somehow still in the mood for gothic dungeon crawling.
So, I've probably played about 8 hours of [Undernauts: Labyrinth of Yomi](https://www.aksysgames.com/undernauts/) over the past two days, and I really like it. It's a straight-up dungeon crawler by Experience Inc. (developers of Stranger of Sword City, Demon Gaze, Operation Abyss and Death Mark), and despite -- or maybe because of -- their niche DRPG pedigree, I find it perhaps the most accessible DRPG I can recommend, without sacrificing any depth or satisfaction the genre is known for. And it does that without taking the expected route of offering different difficulty modes (not that there's anything wrong with that, I'm just impressed by the design), but by reconsidering and polishing off a lot of the genre's jagged edges. There's no permadeath, you can fast travel back to your base camp at any point, enemies are mostly marked on the map, you can set auto-walking paths. But you can still spend a million years making a ridiculous variety of DnD-style character builds and grinding your life away if you want. And there's still a sense of deliberation and danger (the other DnD). They've somehow made this game that has all of the allure and strangeness and mystery -- a game that feels like it should be unapproachable -- into a very smooth experience. They even throw in tweaks to the traditional formula, chiefly in the form of crafting items that allow you to change the structure of the map while simultaneously opening it up, Metroid-like. I've been attracted to the idea of dungeon crawlers since the day Etrian Odyssey came out on the DS, but this one has roped me in the most.
Also in the plus column: you can make all the "yoni" jokes, there's a blunt anti-capitalist narrative, it takes place in (an alternate) 1970s Japan, it has some kinda strange industrial jazz soundtrack, there's pinches of Baroque & Twin Peaks: The Return in there, and the art looks like this:
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@“tokucowboy”#p52433 Well, while I didn’t get to about 10 other games I wanted to this year (Chicory, Inscryption, Unpacking, Neo: The World Ends With You, Ys IX, Cruelty Squad, etc.)
I’m going to throw my proverbial two cents in and say that finding time for Inscryption is a worthy effort.
(It’s probably my 2021 GOTY)
I've been playing Murder By Numbers for the last few days - essentially a picross game decoratedy with a series of murder mysteries narratives. The music is some real damn earworm stuff.
https://twitter.com/AGDDavies/status/1476649100942602250?t=eSRVT45ADN9TLb9iaBYLlg&s=19
@“LeFish”#p52454
According to Nintendo stats, Murder by Numbers was my third most played game this year! The connection between Picross and solving murders was a bit tenuous but I did like the characters and I've always liked Picross.
I finished Echo last night. Overall, a thrilling game but one that pulls its punches at the very last minute.
Many great mechanics besides the reboot cycle, like when the >!gold echoes show up and start wrecking shit!<. Only, the very last level >!is way too easy and, though the idea of a stage full of gold Ens and nothing but sounds terrifying at first blush, with no regular echoes to sabotage your plans by pursuing you or drawing the attention of a giant Astar (from [Planet Danger](https://youtu.be/paEJPShlA_o?t=52)) to slam you into the marble like a ragdoll, it's just a straightfoward sneak around the giant ladies. Maybe if their patrol routes had been a little more unpredictable, or if they fought amongst themselves too.!< Oh well!
Also: what's wrong with two folks talking, huh? Don't take me out of the setting with flashbacks, or whatever it is detractors wanted to see more of in the game's narrative. Do make me feel cold and alone with no one to talk to but my resentful AI buddy. Let him make fun of my CUBE in some excellently acted expository dialogue.
Then I took several attempts at Mr. Meanie's Secret Base in _Saturn Bomberman_ before giving up and going to bed.
En's a lot like Bomberman, except her “bombs” are Fabergé eggs.
I capped off 2021 by finishing SMT3 HD Remaster on Switch (Normal difficulty). I went for the True Demon ending and was not disappointed…just an absolutely engrossing experience of a game, not to mention a perfect example of how to do a remaster. I never played the PS2 original, but I still never really felt like I was playing a nearly 20 year-old game. The visual style definitely lends itself to not feeling dated, but even the mechanics and gameplay felt fresh. The character controls felt clunky and much of the dungeon design was a bit sparse, but that's about the worst I could say. At face value, much of the gameplay was objectively tedious (insane encounter rate, intentionally baffling dungeons), but everything else about it carried me through unperturbed. The progression of challenge was perfect for me once I understood the systems at play and the last stretch was just the right balance of victory lap and gauntlet. There were several points in the final few battles where I was carried by very specific abilities, demons, and choices I had made and it just felt like I earned it (thank you Endure, in particular!). Also, in the final final battle, ||this simple UI change up in the corner hit me really hard…really drove home the finality of having literally murdered God in the penultimate battle…||
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I'm still kind of in that very specific twilight that follows completion of a game I was really invested in, but I've picked up a few things in the past week or so.
I decided to at least dabble in (and maybe complete) ***SMT IV*** before booting up V. It's a little strange going back to the 3DS after playing so much Switch, but I really miss the small size of a _truly_ portable system, not to mention how convenient 2 screens are for menu/maps/etc. I'm not very far into the game, but it's been interesting observing how many little tweaks to the formula have been made (keep in mind, this is only the second SMT game I've put much meaningful time into...I don't think I even made it to a battle in any of the Persona games). Some things feel like a huge relief difficulty-wise (UI elements indicating weaknesses/resistances, carrying on even if the protag falls in battle, being able to see and avoid enemy encounters, paying macca/coins to resurrect), but at the same time the early battles have been downright _brutal_, with even the first low level enemies sometimes able to one-shot party members. Another thing that modern games have spoiled me on is the ability to switch vocal tracks...the English VO is very good (as far as that stuff goes), but it's just a personal quirk that even the best dubs always feel a bit off. I know there is an undub patch out there, but I think I'm ok just sticking with playing unmodded (though the word SAH-murai has been said so much that it pretty much lost all meaning to me at this point).
I've also been playing ***Inscryption***, which I picked up on the strength of some semi-hyperbolic praise I've been seeing. I initially tried to play this on my laptop, but I was surprised to learn that the game is basically unplayable on an integrated intel GPU. Once I switched to my desktop it made more sense--there is a lot more going on with the graphics here than I was expecting, and I love the visual style and sound direction. The actual card game mechanics are not my favorite--the four-lane system and sacrifice-based mana feel very restrictive and I find it easy to paint yourself into a corner where no further moves are possible. It's likely that I'm just bad at it, but I do feel like I'm getting better, and the atmosphere and meta-narrative stuff is really carrying it so far.
@“rejj”#p52449 It's definitely at the top of the heap, & those two cents are noted
i mentioned it in the secret switch games thread, but after a bit more time with lumo, i have to reiterate how nice it is. what i feel most when i play it is the sincere love the people who made it have for those wonky british isometric platformers. i can tell how much they love that stuff, and i can tell how much effort they went to to make it accessible, rather than impenetrable, for me, a relative layman.
@“tokucowboy”#p52433 Just want to let you know that you‘ve 100% sold me on this game. I’m a big Etrian Odyssey fan, and was disappointed with Shin Megami Tensei V except for its alternate Tokyo, creepy vibes and howl-and-buzz soundtrack. I‘ve tried and been mildly impressed with some of Experience Inc’s games in the past, and told myself to check this one out once it released. Then I forgot it existed! Thank you for reminding me. Looks amazing.
I played through the first day of pathologic 2 again. The mindfuck prologue (which is also a tutorial lol) + everything the game throws at you at the beginning is incredibly strong. Still really impressed with how engrossing the game is and how almost successfully the “survival” mechanics are enmeshed in the narrative. I suppose by successful I mean, how a system that “busy” recedes into the background, letting the player think and see through the character's eyes rather than filter all experience and decisionmaking through the mechanics.
the narrative designer on her approach: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/pathologic-2-mindmap-a-questlog-people-actually-read
The _Sátántangó_ of videogames (I like when the 20 jazz funk greats type song plays (that's not a Sátántangó thing just cool))
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At least the greatest western-developed game I can think of. What's better? Maybe NBA Jam.....but not much else
@"kory"#p52678 will be interesting to know what you think about SMT V when you get around to it. But don't skip over IV in a rush to get there - it's a great game!