Would playing the Xbox version of Soul Calibur 2 count for your Spawn spree?
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It is on the list.
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Just finished playing Krimson, it’s a precision platformer that came out a few weeks ago.
Good vibes and level design overall, but it was often too difficult to see your exact location and that made the gameplay frustrating. There are a lot of particles around your character and it all blends into the background in some levels.
Still cool, would recommend.
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I ended up playing Mega Drive Lemmings on stream, which is both good and bad because Lemmings is very good. On the other hand, I will now play nothing else for a month.
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I’m doing my absolute best not to get too wrapped up in rushing to the end and topping the leaderboards lol, because I notice this tendency in myself, that the moment I start to care about optional high scores, the less magically chill the game feels. I think Neon White makes for a great contrast here, since speed is the name of that game. But Neon White feels its best to me when I’m locked in and taking it a bit seriously. The leaderboards there help me soak in the magically wired vibes. Maybe I’ll start to feel that way about Kuru Kuru Kururin when I’ve finished Adventure mode!
Seems like it! Thanks for the recommendations. I’m on these forums but I’m still catching up on games that seem like part of ~the canon~ over here and on the show. Ys, Landstalker and Centy among ’em! And I gotta switch a Bonk game on too, after hearing about them for years now.
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Loaded up Shining Force (the first one) last night. It’s my first time with a real tactical RPG (barring the half-measure TRPGs like Rhapsody, LIVE A LIVE, etc.) and… I’m extremely loving it. I love it so much! I get it now. I’m worried it’s going to alter my gaming trajectory and turn me into one of those TRPG guys. There’s so many tiny aspects about it that I can tell it got right immediately, even without playing earlier TRPGs like the Famicom Fire Emblems – but what I wasn’t expecting was such a strong focus on story and setting! I thought these games were mostly battle-focused with some hands-off cutscenes in between, but there’s full-on Dragon Quest-style exploration. Me lovey that stuff. The typical RPG overworld being one massive battlefield is genius, too. So far this is hitting all kinds of notes to get me feeling right. I understand there’s a lot of Shining Force II lovers around here (and a notably dedicated but smaller following for Shining Force III) and I totally get it. The fact that some people suggest skipping the first game and going straight to II is a daunting promise that even a game this good hardly compares to the quality of its sequels. Games so good that it makes this one obsolete?? I can’t wait to see that for myself, but in the meantime I’m going to have a thoroughly wonderful time with this first one.
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Good for you. You have a lot to look forward to. Don’t see why anyone should skip the original SF, it’s great. I personally would advise caution with Fire Emblem bc imo, they’re similar to SF, but worse. I think after SFII, if you’re looking for another ttrpg from that vintage then go with Front Mission or, if you want to wrestle with another step up in complexity, then beloved Tactics Ogre. Fire Emblem is the most skippable to me, I know others will disagree ofc
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Thanks for the suggestions, there’s been several TRPG series floating around in my brain but I was never exactly sure which path to follow or in what order. If Front Mission is a lateral move difficulty-wise, I might go that way first. I also know the least about those compared to some other series, so it’d be fun to finally see what they’re about. If I was to pick up Tactics Ogre I think it’d be the Super Famicom or Saturn versions, which I understand are a little less forgiving than the more recent re-releases. We’ll see how comfortable I’m feeling after II.
Front Mission is a step toward more genre standard mechanics: meaning considering terrain, more control over individual unit customization and growth, ranged attacks. Shining Force is a bit unique (and brilliant because of this) in that it uses jrpg-lite battle setup in combat; but that’s not really a thing outside of those games to any great degree, as far as I’m aware
As for Tactics Ogre - the PSP version is the most streamlined and forgiving - but that’s not to say it’s simple or easy. I think I would recommend you play that version as someone relatively new to the genre. What’s been streamlined (granular customization of non-story characters) isn’t something more normal people would even notice.
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Relaxing tonight with Botany Manor, a lo-fi indie Myst-like puzzle/walking sim. You explore a mansion to learn about different flowers, and figure out how to grow them. It’s simple, but laid out in a creative way and there’s light environmental storytelling. It very accurately captures the feeling of walking around an estate that was turned into a public garden. It’s pretty short, the runtime seems to be around 3-4 hours. Definitely a calming, cozy bedtime game to have a cup of tea with.
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I put some more time into Ys 2 for the PC-88, and reached quite a puzzle in the game. Basically, what if
- Due to a language barrier, you usually have to try everything to figure out how to advance;
- You do try a very large number of things;
- You are pretty sure you know what to do next;
- What you’re doing isn’t working?
Summary
The issue was this moment in the Noltia Ice Ridge:
I couldn’t get past those ice blocks. After exploring to make sure I was missing nothing else and trying every item and spell to get past it, I get nothing. Even the fire spell doesn’t do anything. Even at 4x speed.
Because I’m pretty sure I’m on the right track but am feeling lost, I break my blind run and search for FAQs online. Except the only English language FAQs for Ys 2 are for the Famicom, PC, or later versions, not this one. None of them show what the players do to get past the block. Everyone seems to get past it trivially easy. The Let’s Plays of these versions have just enough differences that I don’t know what to look for.
A few hours later, I have a revelation. I need to search for Let’s Plays in Japanese. So I plug イースII into YouTube. Pretty soon I have two candidates. The first doesn’t give me the answer but gives me two important clues: a cut shortly before the cave (linked) where the player suddenly gets a ton more XP, MP, and gold, and the moment when their actual fireball looks more powerful than mine. Aha, so fireball may turn into a more powerful form depending on level. Then the second shows me the level they’re at as well as a grinding method for getting there.
So after getting one more level, I blast through the passage with my superpowered fireball. Finally, I’m through.
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Started, played, finished Dragon’s Quest V on the DS (Lite). Took around 50 hours according to the in-game timer, add on an hour or two for having to replay a part of the game after it crashed due to some cheats I’d enabled at around the 42-hour mark (all 7s on the slots, and hold L to crit during battles).
Really enjoyed it, now on the lookout for my next JRPG or ARPG. Thinking something on MD, maybe I’ll get into Landstalker or Story of Thor (or even Phantasy Star IV).
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A strange desire was awoken in me… one to which I can attribute no cause except maybe my stressful new job… I’ve been playing a horror game. Something I’ve never done. It’s the Resident Evil 3 remake. I know its a weird place to start but it’s on Gamepass and I watched my friend play through RE 1, 2, 7, and 8 I felt pretty comfortable starting here haha.
It’s really scary to me, however, I’m driven ever further. It’s truly a surreal experience to want to play a horror game much less to do so. So exciting to leave my box! It’s easy as a video game player to fall so deep in love with your own rut to start despising other ruts.
Once as a kid I was allowed to rent TWO Nintendo 64 games for a weekend at my grandparents. I chose Resident Evil 2 (with the sound of a cartoon gulp) and Yoshi’s Story (to protect me.) When I finally got in front of the TV in the guestroom I booted it up… There was already a save file. Pretty far along it seemed to me. But I could barely handle leaving the save room, even standing just outside of it with no zombies around caused me to genuinely shake. So I stayed in the safe room and read all the files. It seemed like I was there for a long time and gained a great understanding of the strange lore.
I am currently below to hospitol and very scared! But I’m going to try and really finish it!!
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Damn I guess my 6-year old midrange pre built PC isn’t just failing on AAAA $70 open world games like Dragons Dogma 2, but apparently it can’t even keep up with $25 indies like Pacific Drive. I can play the game on low settings but it still crashes pretty regularly.
As for the game itself, so far I am wishing there were fewer reasons to get out of your car every 30 seconds and more uninterrupted cruising. But it doesn’t seem like that’s going to be the case.
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Somewhere into Radical Dreamers now, no idea how far. Our next goal is to find the Einlanzer and we’re deeply enjoying speculating about aspects of this game and its characters. I really wish more Satellaview games were re-released like this.
Also playing that new Snufkin game, and playing it in Swedish (Finno-Swedish, I suppose) for the language practice.
Also also decided to start my playthrough of Kingdom Hearts Final Mix back up. I’d had aspirations of playing/replaying all the games prior to finally playing KH3 but the time wasn’t quite right then. Now I guess it is? There’s definitely a kind of patina on this game compared to how it gleamed for teenage me, but I can still see quite clearly why I was so into it in the 2000s.
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I was wanting to sit with some Toriyama, so I finally got around to trying Blue Dragon on a slow Sunday. It’s an interesting time from another place.
At lot of it comes off pretty strange in the year 2024. I’ll say later that it feels like a step on a branching path that JRPGs did not take, and the weirdness comes from trying to find its footing in that. From the jump, it does this thing where a TikTok-assed text-to-speech voice says “playable” every time the game transitions from a cutscene to interactive gameplay. I assume it does that for other things, too, as the same text bubble pops up for things like “defeated” and “fleeing” enemies, but I disabled that speech real quick. Video cutscenes of people just standing around talking are a constant interruption. It’s also very odd in that the majority of things in the environment that look like copy-pasted set dressing assets (trees, rocks, stumps, etc. on the environmental margins) are searchable and yield items (or sometimes even a bit of experience), but they have no button prompt or indication that they are. It’s a game that literally encourages you to kick rocks, often.
What I mean by it being a step on the path that JRPGs didn’t ultimately take is that, if you were a kid playing Final Fantasy V or Dragon Quest IV on the Super Famicom, this is probably what you dreamed a “future” JRPG would look and play something like. Aside from thinking of Toriyama, that’s what finally made me feel like it was the time to look at more than just the game’s icon on my console. I always have at least one JRPG in the rotation, and its made me realize lately that we seem to have taken two divergent genre paths with a couple of exceptions: “traditional” JRPGs that tend to be more contained, lower-budget 2D or fixed-camera diorama affairs, and “modern” JRPGs with larger budgets that are almost always action-RPG hybrids or something open-world adjacent.
Nothing wrong with those, but having tons of the former in my JRPG bucket lately left me with a very specific itch for a traditionally styled JRPG, but one that was 3D with a moveable camera (not sure if I’ve had one of those since Dragon Quest XI). I still wanted to go and buy new gear from every little town and talk to people who are just standing in the same spot for all eternity and open up a load of treasure chests – that format will, by all indications, always work for me – but I wanted to feel a little more planted in the world, and Blue Dragon is that. Toriyama’s designs here range from unhinged to legit cute to main-character-who-would-otherwise-be-an-NPC-in-Dragon-Quest, and 3 hours in, it certainly lacks any sort of juice (not to say that there aren’t interesting surprises, like this song coming out of nowhere or there being an entirely unexpected amount of poops and farts). But it is a high-budget Super Famicom RPG in very pretty 3D, with all the confident “this is the future” vibes of 2007 – the sans-serif fonts, the minimalist UI, the real-time talking-head camera that pops up when you talk to NPCs, my Xbox booting the 360 logo and logging me into an Xbox Live account in which my avatar is a compressed picture of a dog that I don’t recognize at all – and there’s something to that, at least.
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Tokucowboy thanks for the blue dragon impressions, I have been wondering about that one too.
I am currently playing Xenoblade Chronicles 3, I’m around chapter 6 and this game is getting bananas. So far enjoying it, there seems like a lot of systems but it also seems flexible enough to let you just do your thing and partake in as much as you want too.
I did play an enjoy Xenoblade 1, but I didn’t play 2 or torna.
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shining force was my first love… it doesn’t really get much better than SRPG With Cool Towns and Fox Girls… secretly the most interesting part of these games is managing XP distribution since there’s a finite amount of kills to be had. if you’re clever you can really break the thing open and it’s a good time! shining force 2 aims really high and is much more polished and colorful but they introduced random battles and they are a drag.
maybe this is a cliche but you gotta play FFT asap if shining force speaks to you at all, it really is an all-timer and probably is still the apex of the genre. a very layered and intricate matsuno yarn punctuated by cartoonishly exploitable strategy combats
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This is something I’ve been picking up on! It feels a bit like those NES Final Fantasy games where party members would waste a turn if they attacked a monster that was already defeated. It’s fun and exciting having to plan ahead in this kind of way that newer games have slowly been erasing through “quality of life features” (EXP share, auto-targeting, etc.)
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