That’s good to know! Reed was fucked over by NUSA and still chose to be a cop about things so it did feel like an easy choice, or at least one that stood for something idk.
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i love vs to pieces and it occupies a huge chunk of my brain but i really think the only reason i played the absolute wheels off of that game was because i was a child and got like 1 new game a year.
it’s so ripe for a remake/sequel. i really enjoyed stranger of paradise but the whole time I was like “why isn’t it vagrant story”
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just can’t get enough of xenoblade x. can’t believe this game is real. can’t believe this music is real.
it’s a better phantasy star online than new genesis, and it’s barely online and not even an action game.
love how it knows that i don’t want to do the main story, love that it just lets you go.
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That was largely how I felt about it too, despite actually liking Reed as a character a lot
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Only about an hour into Xenoblade Chronicles X and is it too early to say I already think this is my favorite one of these?? I like the more straight forward sci-fi setting and aesthetics. Really excited to keep playing it.
My hand hurt like hell after that hour playing though, I think I just can’t play the Switch in handheld anymore. It’s an ergonomic nightmare.
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In the original Xenoblade X I made an incredibly stupid character with an incredibly stupid name. I encountered what I thought was a bug where a random NPC in the streets had my name.
A dozen hours in I realised the developers had used the same stupid name for one of the recruitable party members
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Chronicles X is the cool + dumb parts of those games minus the skin crawling parts which as a strategy seems to have paid off in this one instance, before they went right back to doing the other stuff
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got chants of sennaar last night on a whim before bed and stayed up all night accidentally doing a 100% complete good end playthru for like 6 straight hours oooooops work is rough today lol
anyway great lil game, i love language puzzles, the ending was pretty cool and did some unexpected things, i wish there was more of it and more challenging stuff in it cuz i’m a sicko. might finally try obra dinn next, or get some dramamine and ginger to try outer wilds cuz i just feel like that’ll be the game for me but first person games make me motion sick so often
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Yes! I did Sennaar over several days, and it was lovely. I haven’t technically 100% it either (got a couple of glyphs to decipher).
If you want more like it, I currently have wishlisted another game a friend of mine suggested, 7 Days to End with You. I don’t find it as compelling aesthetically, but it still seems to turn the deciphering-a-language-from-shared-context gears.
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I checked out Beyond Citadel (the retro FPS) on a whim, and ended up playing five hours. This game rules actually. Good guns.
… Although I cannot recommend it to anyone at all, because it’s impossible to talk about this game without mentioning the extreme gore of half-naked anime girls. The solo developer has said this isn’t a fetish game, but he definitely has some extremely specific… interests. I think being asexual actually made the art less weird for me, because otherwise the ero guro stuff would have been pretty uncomfortable instead of just unusual.
I feel like 90% of people who see this game will bounce off immediately, 1% will be kinda into the fetish side of it, and 9% (me) will be retro FPS sickos.
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i read chris person’s aftermath article on that game and it intrigued me as much as it pushed me away. i might get the first one on a sale and if it’s not my type i could always refund it
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The music is solid but you’re forgetting the best track https://youtu.be/c_N7WgxEoI8?feature=shared
It’s up there with the Dorm Theme from Persona 3.
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I’ve been playing a game many here may like. It’s called 迷宮城ハイドラ or Hydra Castle’s Labyrinth. It’s developed by E Hashimoto who had previously developed a game called Buster.
It’s a freeware metroidvania (I’m playing a version on 3ds I found on hshop), and if you’ll forgive the comparison, I think it has a lot in common with everyone’s favorite freeware game by a Japanese solo dev, cave story. It has a very handcrafted charm, including little bits of friction that are rough around the edges. There seems to be a confident vision of what game design should be mixed with the sense of exploration and oddity you can get from these solo dev projects. There’s lots of back tracking involved with no map, but when you find do find a new ability it’s like a great gust of a second wind. It’s been perfect to play for short bursts on train rides or before bed.
This is more of a me thing, but it’s also emblematic of a whole scene of games I’m just beginning to discover, and by that I mean games not commercialized on steam and/or passion projects inspired by forgotten classics. I’m sure not all of them will be as good as cave story or hydra’s labyrinth but it’s a cool feeling to think “oh I really like games like this” (so recommendations welcome)
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uh uh
hyyeah
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i got the hori split something or other and it made a huge difference fwiw
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ooooh I’ve never heard of this game before and it sounds right up my alley - thanks for sharing!
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After my last little game-log, things sort of returned to normalcy (plus several days this last week contending with migraines 
), so I’ve had a more normal amount of gaming time again
I’m closing in on the end of Act 4 in Wrath of the Righteous now, following a bunch of shorter 1-2 hour sessions with the game. Given the game’s quest-based structure, that pacing works fairly well, and it’s given me the feeling of lingering in the Abyss for far longer than I normally would. This visit to the plane included seeing a few things I hadn’t before, like a hidden loot container with a special relic inside that is right behind your entrance into the first major area. Across seven full playthroughs, I’ve apparently just never thought to turn around from zoning in, which I found thoroughly amusing
The other new-to-me happenings involved some spoilery things: in the Abyss, you’re accompanied by an incognito angelic herald, who will resurrect you and join any fights in which your main character dies. It turns out, he can only do so three times, though, which had never come up because I’ve normally played melee characters, which tend not to get taken down quickly or by surprise. This time, though, on a caster, it happened much more easily, and I got to see a special little cutscene where my celestial buddy got found out (and prevented from assisting me further, at least in that way). He’ll still lend a hand in another instance that I also hadn’t encountered by preventing someone invading your mind. I’d never noticed because I’d always just save-scummed the Willpower check, but since I’ve generally been trying to avoid that this playthrough, he stepped in for me
As seems to have become my habit this run, I concluded my play session with just a little bit more to go before this act’s big setpiece. From there, I’ll essentially be on the home stretch to finishing this run but also finally at the point where I’ll get to experience the rest of the game’s 5th DLC (which is split between a side campaign and some additional content in the main campaign), and the 6th one, the game’s sort of Mass Effect 3 – Citadel-style send-off, for the first time. I’ll also be checking out the semi-hidden Devil Mythic Path for the first time (spurred on in part by some significant updates to it since the last time I played)
All in all, as I look toward the end of this run, I still love this game to bits, and I wish it were easier to recommend to people. I do expect though that Owlcat will probably follow the path of many of their CRPG forebears in steadily pursuing more approachable games, so for the time being, I plan to enjoy the games while they’re still as complex and dense as this one is
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ooh this looks look it’s got that la-mulana max throwback vibe
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I finished Paranormasight. It started super strong but ended in a (bunch of) whimper(s) for me. The beginning chapters with all the curse happenings and lore building set my mine ablaze. I like the characters, Mio is the best. The late night setting feels spooky and dangerous.
But then… comes the day time… where curses can’t be activate… It’s still fun to chase down several lines of murder cases past and present but I felt the whole thing got neutered without the curse power. Most of the curses are neutralized by just talking during the day time. Deflating. When the curses finally get activated again, there are only a couple of curse actions and game ends in few different endings. Overall it just lacks the viciousness that it initially suggested and I craved. Some of the endings do end in grisly mass murders (described in text) but those endings are just side plot endings and not satisfying. I like the school girls plot as it feels like Famicom Detective Club. I had to look up how to get the main ending and the main mystery is revealed in meekest tacked on way and the whole thing ended up being a big oop lol nvm.… and… I enjoyed the game.
Famicom Detective Club Part II The Girl Who Stands Behind sfc is still my goty 2025.
I just loaded Metal Slader Glory sfc translation to my vita for my sleepy time game. Let’s see how it goes.
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I had a similar experience with Paranormasight. I generally think it’s a very good game, but the ending was quite disappointing. The first few hours (in game narrative time) are incredible, and some of the tensest and most dread-filled things I’ve played in a game. But…
…That’s where the game peaked.
If you’d told me before hand that this was a game that subverts genre expectations of a second night of terror, by wrapping the game up with a stimulating daytime investigation and story development, then I would have been super-intrigued.
But the way the actual second half of the game goes, it just kind of falls flat. And doesn’t really make the best of what good features it has (the ‘???’ sideplot particularly).
And the true ending was just stupid in the end. Worse than just being a bad ending, it soured me on a lot of the mechanics (particularly the alternate timeline) because I realised they’re only in the game in a ‘minimum viable product’ sense to make the ending seem less out of character with the game.
(There’s also a known glitch with the Yakko escapes the school scene, where the game doesn’t acknowledge that you’ve seen the alternate version. Thus rendering the hunt for alternate scenes completely impractical because you can’t trust the timeline map.)
I did like some stuff in the day time though. like the second Harue confrontation scene.
I’d also like to hear opinions on the translation quality from someone who has played the game in Japanese and English.
I didn’t have a problem with the English language in the game mostly. But the scene where they discuss Mio’s name (mi-wo in Katakana), and how it has a “weird character”, seems like a product of overly-literal translation. I don’t know why you’d mention it but not also make her name something like Miø.
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