Lurker > DeadTaffer

Sprung: The Dating Game

It's about as deep as the name would suggest. It's certainly a breath of fresh air from current year sensibilities though and even if the story is pretty crap and the whole game is pretty much nothing but dialogue tree puzzles it does have some pop culture shout outs sprinkled in that can be pretty genuinely witty sometimes as well as tons of unique responses if you're willing to mess around with all the options just for the hell of it.

Picross 3D

I had forgotten how many of the late game puzzles really feel like they expect you to cheat or guess. Probably not the most egregious example of this I've seen though.

Soul of Darkness

This game was pretty much exactly what I had been led to believe it would be, and that's legally distinct Castlevania with checkpointing on each screen. That latter part may seem lame, and it kind of is but overall it honestly makes getting through some high jank parts of the game more palatable, especially considering how for the last couple stages they bizarrely appeared to take oddly specific inspiration from some of the most frustrating bosses in classicvania, namely those from the later stages in Belmont's Revenge. Though the "story" if you wanna call it that is a lot more like the one in the first few seconds of Haunted Castle in terms of abrupt randomness.

Final Fantasy (GBA - Dawn of Souls)

I've never beaten any version of this game before except for one time I ran through the NES version with god mode game genie cheats on in the space of a few hours. The grinding/leveling pace in this one feels very smooth. Suspiciously smooth for a game that old. But at this point that's probably a good thing.

Fairune 2

I vaguely remember playing the first one on mobile years ago and liking it. This one was a bit of a contrast to that; even though the game is short, it still felt padded for the kind of gameplay it has. There's quite a few moments in the game where you're expected to notice some extremely subtle graphical details to tell you something is different and hides a secret path that leads to something necessary. I was also surprised by the fact you're expected to collect pretty much everything to make it to the end despite a lot of the things you come across striking me as optional at first, and a good bit of unexpected backtracking especially later on which is required to progress with whatever the newest place you're exploring is. My end runtime was apparently just under 7 hours but it definitely felt longer.

Dragon Quest II: Luminaries of the Legendary Line (GBC)

I started playing the Dragon Quest games last year as one of the RPG series I've not played in the past which I wanted to check out for contrived reasons, I played 1-4 at that time but only finished 1 mainly owing to how grindy the first 3 were and 4 surprising me with its length. Having come back to an ostensibly more streamlined version of it, it still feels pretty grindy but also somewhat better paced than what I was expecting, at least until the endgame where you're expected to grind 10+ levels between when you get to the final area and when you storm the main bad guy's castle. Still, I'd say it feels like a more polished experience overall which is probably a good thing for the followup to the game that's sometimes considered "the" granddaddy of JRPGs (which from what I remember is itself more than 90% grinding despite its short length), and since I put it on my 3DS which I jailbroke recently I was able to fit the more lengthy grinding sessions into some downtime I had during work and other times.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

I had a nice time. Can say pretty confidently I liked it more than BotW even though most of my experience with that game is a blur at this point, though I'm pretty sure I like this one more precisely because I had that foundation of having some previous experience and knowledge of the mechanics/world already. That's probably reflected by the fact that this time around I beat the game after playing for 2 months on and off as opposed to BotW where I played for a while, got an ending and then put it down for 2 months (or probably more idr) before I went back to do the rest of the story stuff.

WarioWare Gold

Figured I'd keep it going with another kinda-replay. This one's mostly rehashed minigames from earlier titles but it can be seen as an updated way to experience any that you missed. The high score goals for each stage feel a lot harder in this than for any of the previous games though, but since all the extras are now unlocked with coins that you can grind by playing any mode they're more of an extra thing than anything (even if they do help you get those coins faster).

WarioWare: Touched!

Finally did some funny and absolutely legitimate business with my 3DS yesterday so probably gonna be checking out some more stuff on there in the near future. This one was a replay but I don't recall if I ever previously bothered to go for the high scores on all the stages/toys to try and unlock everything like I did this time (have yet to go for the high scores on the individual minigames). I played this game with a mouse before and wondered if some of the trickier feeling minigames would be any different with an actual stylus and touch screen, and my conclusion is "not that much". The blowing into the mic minigames are a tad more straining when you're doing that for real though.

Majotori

I still haven't finished Tears of the Kingdom which I started on launch day but since the steam sale came about I picked up this singleplayer trivia title which I'd been recommended before. It's highly replayable but a single run can be completed in one sitting. It's got quite a nice selection of trivia which is integrated into stories which have a random outcome influenced by how many questions you get wrong and right each round which I found to be a quite fun way of doing it. My only complaint is the unusually large volume of anime questions (categories frequency can be adjusted in the settings, but they fall into a general animation category which covers other things) which 95% of the time I know nothing about.

Castlevania Judgment

Technically a replay yadda yadda, I honestly would've been content to never touch this game again but I forced myself to suffer through it some more mostly for personal research reasons (trying to concretely find out where all the songs play). I'm also like a month late to actually do this writeup but might as well get it out of the way.

The music's still very good. It's really the only big draw of the game. I'm not into fighting games at all really but even I can tell how lackluster this whole experience is. The graphics and character design are w/e, I'm not big into that either so I don't really care (though I'm definitely aware of how bizarre some of them are like Carmilla the goth-punk hooker, Death the dentist, and Grant the... whatever the hell he's supposed to be), though as someone who is very familiar with CV it is pretty jarring seeing the monster models which are recycled from Curse of Darkness, a game from the previous generation. The fighting, from my self-admitted noob standpoint, is clunky as shit, but at least they let you use a gamecube controller. Some of it might be blamed on the unique playstyle it has, which is freely controlling characters on a 3D plane rather than the traditional 2D/2.5D perspective that's been polished with many titles over the years, but then again the original Dissidia FF came out around the same time and did a much better job of it.

The game modes are, to my understanding, pretty standard stuff for a fighting game. Story, Arcade, VS, and a couple gimmick modes that I never even touched before this run, Survival and Castle. Survival is just as it name implies, win as many battles as possible in a row. The trouble with this mode is that the opponent AI is piss easy compared to every other mode in the game, so you can just find a spammable move that works and do that for a couple hours if you really want to, though the expected performance seems to be about 20 rounds since that's about how high the preset high score table goes. You regain about a third of your health bar every time you win so the risk factor is even lower. I think you fight Dracula every 20 rounds or so and he's a smidge more challenging but if you survive you're set to just keep going if you're not sick of it already.

Castle mode is probably the most unique part of the game, you move through a grid of rooms where instead of just going through normal battles you have to complete special challenges like survive waves of monsters as you try to collect a certain number of heart drops from breaking the destructible objects on the map. Once each room is cleared you can just pass through it, but you keep your HP level between them and have to go back to a save room to refill it, you can also get "random encounters" while moving through cleared rooms to frustrate that. As you might imagine if you lose all your health you have to start over from your last save, but thankfully there's no limit to saving as long as you can get to the save room. The maps are unique to each playable character, though you still always have to fight Dracula at the end and unlike in Survival mode he can bat you around like a motherfucker. Pun totally intended.

There's also extra unlocks like artwork and accessories you can put on the characters if you play these gimmick modes, but by the time you've got those extras you'll probably be fed up with the game already. Overall would not recommend unless you're obsessed with Castlevania like me and you have to be able to say you at least experienced it.

ActRaiser Renaissance

Been wanting to play this one for a while as I quite liked the original when I first played it. It's certainly different.

The action sections are fairly faithful recreations of the originals (not 1:1 mapwise, but quite close progression-beatwise), with the most obvious difference being the graphics. TBH those stood out to me in a not-great way at first as they largely consist of 3D renders converted into sprites, like you'd see in Donkey Kong Country, except they're conspicuously significantly lower res than even that so all the characters just look kinda blurry and uneven compared to the tight spritework of the original. Controls are a bit clunky too, but having quickly replayed the original definitely helped with adjusting to that sooner than later.

The town sim is still the meat of the game where you'll spend the vast majority of your time, and is where the most significant changes come in. A good chunk of it still follows the same kind of flow as the original, but the gameplay is effectively doubled by the new siege/raid quests, which are basically tower defense, but which suffer from a good few hit and miss factors. You can build forts to block or attack enemies, which you'd think you'd be allowed to place wherever you want for the sake of strategy, but instead you can only place each type of fort in a seemingly arbitrary predetermined set of positions which may end up leaving some of the paths wide open. During the actual sieges you can also place fragile, easily-replaced palisades on the roads to further stall your enemies, although this suffers from the same limitation. Combine this with the fact that as in the original, you have no direct control over just where your important resource-producing facilities (farms and workshops) will be built, and things can get a bit frustrating when the odds decide to stack against you. There's always about 5 sieges to go through in each area in addition to overseeing the town's expansion and completing other tasks, so it can feel like a bit of a padded chore.

One upside to this addition though is that in each area you get to recruit and command a hero character, at first this just serves to give you an additional crutch in clearing out the monsters faster but it quickly turns into elemental rock paper scissors as you unlock the three types of heroes you can summon for this (melee, ranged, and magic) which feels a lot more strategic and controllable than placing your gates and towers does. The heroes also play into the new stories/dialogue that each area has, which again pretty much largely follow the beats and lead to the same outcomes as in the original, but giving the world some more development and depth without bringing any crazy radical changes into it. Another semi-related minor addition in the town sim is that monster lairs are no longer automatically sealed and are instead timed mini-action stages that get progressively harder, but never to the point that it feels overbearing.

Something else significant is that there is one new area in this version which is only accessible in postgame. My prior comments pretty much apply there; it has the most gimmicky monster lair stages and one of the worst sieges in the game that easily took me the highest number of retries, as it requires you to defend your farms which are extremely fragile and as stated can and will be built anywhere on the map where there's enough room, even if that happens to be an abysmal position relative to available defense placements. There were two additional sieges after that which felt like a joke in comparison (can I call this a Bloodbane moment?).

The story for this new area also develops somewhat disappointingly, as there's only one action stage at the end instead of the usual two, there's no new hero to recruit, it's established that it takes place in a setting where neither humans nor the monster servants of the main game's villain had ever set foot, and the story mostly concerns the mystery of why there are monsters that show up and start attacking the settlers anyway which turns out to be because some mysterious being (literally called "Unknown" in the boss fight) that may or may not be another god/angel like yourself had been hiding there.

It's definitely nowhere near as satisfying as the conclusion to the main game but I guess that's something of a trend in somewhat recent RPG remasters (looking at you, Xenoblade Future Connected) but at least it gives me an excuse to mention another positive, which is that not only is all the music from the original included in both original chiptune and new arranged versions, there are also a good chunk of new compositions which exist in both formats as well, courtesy of Yuzo Koshiro who returned to contribute to this project. I'm quite partial to a few of the new compositions, particularly the new town themes for Aitos and Marahna, and especially in the SNES style.

There's a few extra details I could mention like how the angel now has a charge attack that I forgot existed 99% of the time and how a lot of the postgame quests/achievements are some of the most pointless stuff you'll ever see as they call for grinding/doing "I vant you to keel seex snow moose" quests at a point where you've already done everything that matters, but hey, don't gotta feel bad at all for ignoring those altogether. Overall, I'd say I'd recommend it to fans of the original if you think you can adjust to the dumb siege quests (which is ironically not too difficult because of how dumbed down they feel) and just feel like you want more out of the classic that was the original.

ActRaiser

Another replay but I recently started playing ActRaiser Renaissance on steam and as is my wont I felt compelled to quickly replay the original to better judge how different it was and whether it was an improvement. I remembered the original only being a few hours long; I was right, this was another example of a game where I previously got to the final boss and then never actually beat it, it probably helped that this time I played it over two sessions instead of just one like I did originally.

The platforming/action sections which are the first thing you experience in the game do feel fairly clunky even by the standards of the time I think, especially your weapon reach; a problem I've noticed being unusually common for me in games I've played as of late is playing a platformer where you're a sword user and doing a long string of attacks where the thing I'm trying to hit is just barely out of my weapon range (Blasphemous has this too). The upside is that most of the levels are designed to compensate for the clunkiness by giving you health refills at convenient intervals and occasionally extra lives, though this doesn't matter much as you can just restart the level with no penalty if you run out of lives. Bosses can be a bit annoying/tedious with trying to damage them and stay alive, but for a lot of them you can just out-DPS them or find the right magic to use to just nuke them unceremoniously.

The town sim is honestly the more distinctive and memorable part of the game for me, maybe it's just the monkey brain satisfaction of seeing everything progress and flourish just the right way after I've cleared the path for it. The way it actually proceeds is pretty simple but the presentation with the dialogue you have with your followers as you expand is really nice worldbuilding. Weirdly enough this is the part of the game where you can upgrade your character for the action sections which I reckon I have significantly more to say about after this new run; you need to get offerings from your followers to upgrade your lives and magic capacity and get new spells, and most of the time you get this from events which are practically automatic or require some pretty straightforward nudging on your part but others just feel like total non sequiturs, like hitting one of your own temples with lightning to scare one of your followers into giving up an item that he'd been secretly keeping even though you get no hint that that's what will happen.

One more thing that I only really learned about in this new run that feels bizarre to me is the way the world population system works; you need to raise the world population to increase your own level and raise your health, but what determines the max population for each area is not only the type and number of structures that are present (you need to go out of your way to demolish less advanced structures so that they're rebuilt as newer ones) but also... the score you get for the action sections for that area. Which you get no in-game indication that these two mechanics are in any way connected. You also can't redo action stages without restarting the entire game. This wouldn't be too much of a hangup for me if not for the fact that unless you do some pretty deliberate minmaxing in that regard it's impossible to hit the upper level threshold of 17, for which you need to hit 4600 world pop (I was about 100 short of this in the end, and about 150 short of what's apparently the upper threshold for maximum possible world pop, according to retroachievements anyway).

So that felt pretty weird and undermined the straightforward enjoyment of the game for me a bit, but even with this slightly-less-than-perfect build I managed to actually follow through and beat the final boss this time around. Thankfully level 16 was enough for the "DPS race with some judicious pattern recognition use" strategy to work. Overall it's a pretty cool experience that's largely carried by the uniqueness of the gameplay and the world and how good the music is. Will probably play again at some point and maybe attempt the minmaxing nonsense now that I'm at least aware of it.

Underleveled posted...

For anyone who has played through Wario Land II, would you consider finishing the "main" levels as beating the game? The credits roll but then there are 25 "hidden" stages, and even the early ones seem pretty tough. Plus to get the "true" ending you need to 100% the game so I'm not sure if I should count this yet...

I would probably count it as beating the game, I vaguely recall the first set of hidden levels being inaccessible until after you complete the "normal" route and while I don't remember if it's the case for all of them, pretty sure for most of them you get a unique ending for getting to the end of that branch and all that's different if you clear the be-all-end-all 100% final level (which is balls hard) is that you get one more ending with a unique animation which still feels pretty simplistic in relation to the others so the most significant part of 100%ing would just be if you want to get as much as you can out of the game.

The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons

Grabbed this and Oracle of Ages and a couple Monster Hunter titles just before the eshop closed, not my first time playing through the Oracles but it is the first time I'm playing either of them on an actual handheld system. I played most of this while on a trip abroad at the start of April, doing one dungeon + exploration for the next one each night, but didn't finish it then; it wasn't until this last weekend that I went back to run through the final dungeon and finish the game.

For this particular title (and what I remember of Ages), I'd say the overworld exploration aspect is a bit more scuffed than in Link's Awakening just because of the multi-layered different seasons mechanic making it that much more difficult for it to easily cement in your memory. I also don't quite remember how it works in Ages, but outside of a very small number of extremely specific places there's next to no reason to use the animal buddy mechanic (I always go for Dimitri) so I mostly forgot it was in there. This is alleviated somewhat by the Subrosia segments, which lack the changing seasons mechanic and have a significantly smaller map, making it easier to tell what may be stopping you from going forward, or what places you haven't gone before that you can now.

Bearing in mind that LA is likely my favorite 2D Zelda, one way I would say Seasons improved on its predecessor is the dungeon puzzles, which thanks to a recent (and as of yet incomplete) replay of LA through archipelago multiworld I was reminded of a small amount of quite hamfisted bits to them such as finding a bombable wall through nothing but sword wall-poking; there were a couple puzzles in Seasons I spent a little longer on than I expected but I never really felt like it got to that level. Speaking of dungeons, I would say I found the bosses slightly more confusing/frustrating in this game versus LA, but reflecting upon it that's probably because I'm much more familiar with every aspect of that game so I wouldn't spend any time trying to remember how to effectively hurt some of them. That being said, I did manage to beat all but 2 bosses on the first try; the ones that I didn't I got on the second. I would still probably say that this game's version of Gohma is quite possibly the most frustrating boss in the GB Zeldas just because of how unforgiving the kiting technique you're expected to use is and the relatively limited health/resources you have at the time.

One thing I did markedly dislike about it is how a couple of the heart pieces were distributed; as with the other GB Zeldas there is a relatively small amount to be found, but two of them seem to be based on nothing but RNG (bump into Maple and hope she drops it never happened during this last run, and plant a gasha seed in a high-level spot and hope that's what you get for it), which did leave a bad taste.

The music is quite good in both Oracle titles; Seasons does contain Dancing Dragon Dungeon, which I believe would easily be the most recognizable track between them. There's also pieces like Ancient Ruins, which sounds suspiciously similar to the theme from Gargoyle's Quest, another GB Capcom title which came out a decade earlier (but which curiously enough, neither of the composers for this game were involved with).

Overall, while I don't think it gets to the level of tight pacing/design and memorability as Link's Awakening, Seasons is definitely one to check out if you enjoy this series/style. Now who knows if I'll get around to redoing Ages as well in the same fashion anytime soon...

Saw this while looking through the topics list in the aftermath of VGMC noms so might as well. I've tried to keep track of all the stuff I've been playing since some part of last year via Grouvee, why not go ahead and add to that effort in some other form.

Games I've beaten in 2023 so far (even if I started playing them earlier):
Elden Ring
Subnautica (replay, for archipelago multiworld)
Mizzurna Falls (replay)
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (replay, but first time playing through SAT and PSP versions)
Mafia: Definitive Edition (replay)
Subnautica: Below Zero
Hogwarts Legacy
Yakuza 0
Getsu Fuuma Den
Grand Theft Auto III (partial replay)
Grand Theft Auto Vice City (partial replay)
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories
Grand Theft Auto IV: The Complete Edition
Grand Theft Auto V
Overcooked 2
Castlevania: Curse of Darkness (replay)
Rogue Legacy (mostly a replay but I had never beaten the final boss before; did it again right after for archipelago multiworld)
Donkey Kong 64 (randomizer)
Castlevania 64 (randomizer)

And now for the only one that's fresh enough on my mind to do a quick comment as I literally played through the whole thing today:

The Charnel House Trilogy
It's a point and click adventure. It advertises itself as three games in one; it's not, it's one continuous story with three 'chapters', two of which have you controlling the same character, and all it is is an extended introduction for something that the outro promises will come in 2016, the year after the game was released, that as of right now still hasn't materialized. I found the character you spend most of the game with rather unlikable. The setting for the game's second and third parts is a confusing metaphysical conduit of the "brings your personalized inner demons to life" variety which ended up reading largely like a disguised self-therapy session for the writer. At least the music they furnished the game with is pretty good, which fittingly enough was the main reason I pushed myself to play it, to better contextualize a song from it I had picked out for a VGM list channel I'm running.

I'll admit I've been mostly oblivious about what's been going on here so far but hey some good news

Doubling up on Breaking Free to lock
+ NEO: The World Ends With You | Breaking Free | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQmfrBAfBI0

Supporting this one too also to lock
+ Xenoblade Chronicles 3 | Moebius Battle | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKsOyTB98As

Doubling up on this one too and hoping for the best
+ Velocity 2X | Jintinda Lab | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=020CcYmSswY

Adding another fresh one for the hell of it
+ The Firemen | Raging Fire | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1eBlwsRVDI

+ Mirror's Edge Catalyst | Kingdom | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDIWGGSnxTs
+ The Blackwell Legacy | NYU | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtWPgmp_J-A
+ Unavowed | Brooklyn Blue | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI_08YnnieA
+ NEO: The World Ends With You | Breaking Free | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQmfrBAfBI0
+ Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers | Gabriel's Radio | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZI2zvhKBuM

+ Tenchu: Stealth Assassins | Training Course | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6bfArs3Jl0
+ PC Building Simulator: IT Expansion | Immortal | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoV3s2N8DSo
+ Velocity 2X | Jintinda Lab | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=020CcYmSswY
+ Xenoblade Chronicles 3 | Keves Castle (Battle) | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7KIrPSra7s
+ Famicom Detective Club Part II: The Girl Who Stands Behind (SNES) | Police Department | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8cv-d4ZqWY