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« on: January 01, 2024, 03:01:25 AM »
15. Shin Megami Tensei: Persona (PSP, 2009)
I imagine if I actually liked traditional dungeon crawlers this would be a fascinating one. Like, as much as the systems here are pretty archaic even polished up for the PSP version, you can do some funny stuff. But it's also a game where you have like two dungeons per boss and every boss except the final boss is a pushover as long as you have any kind of resources.
I mean maybe that's unfair, I was probably pretty powerful because I am shameless with guides and such, but in general that's just not really what I look for in my rpgs y'know?
Mostly though I realized when I started on it that it was the oldest game on my pile of games (or at least, the PS1 version was) and like... wow. That's pretty neat.
14. Sonic CD Anniversary Edition (2011, as part of Sonic Origins (Switch, 2020))
So I just never played Sonic CD back in the day, nor when Sonic Collections were originally a thing (Sonic being among the first to really do that) since Sonic CD was kinda in its own second collection with all the other Also Rans. And of course who had a Sega CD. So I thought heck, why not.
I didn't really get very thorough with it, I'm pretty bad at the UFO chase special stages, but with the updated mechanics it's certainly a pleasant enough diversion. It it interesting that the bosses are more set pieces than boss fights, which didn't really catch on at the time in the series but would get more prominent later. So nice to see the historical context there.
13. Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean (2003, as part of Baten Kaitos I+II HD Remaster (Switch, 2023))
As best as I can remember, I got this as a review copy back in the day, played what ended up being about a third of the way into the game, and stopped because I was daunted by having to rebuild my entire deck. Now, I ended up just straight up turning on Gameplay Skip here, because I was more interested in just seeing how the game wrapped up rather than getting the Full Experience.
Honestly as a game it really shows a lot of its flaws more readily when you aren't in the thick of it. The areas in the game are actually pretty tiny, which makes sense because this thing really went all out on the prerendered backgrounds that were common in the PS1 era but phased out by the time BK came out, and the detail and beauty of those things would have been hard to do massive sprawling environments with. But because of that, they also made the enemy density *nuts* and required a lot of backtracking both within dungeons and between story beats in order to achieve a proper 'size' for the scope of story they were telling. Like once you're not micromanaging your deck you realize this game is padded to fuck.
There's a pretty lengthy segment where you have to remember where all the macguffins were to retrieve your party and like, I'm here playing this game on fast forward, that was about 3 gameplay hours ago, and I still forgot most of them and ran around everywhere. And that's not even counting that if you do them in the wrong order and aren't cheating it's a nightmare because the GAME assumes you did them in a specific order and escalates the boss fights based on that assumption. It's just a deeply weird design choice for any reason except purely wanting ot make the game longer and space out the big plot twists more.
I do really, really like the ending though. Like, the bad guys spend all game reviving this dead malevolent god and you get there and... thing thing's been frankenstein'd together, even if it's mostly the original deal it's been locked away for a thousand years, it just. Does not care anymore. It's suffered enough. I just really enjoy that note of melancholy, and it's probably my favorite execution of that sorta thing I've seen from Kato (did you know that the scenario writer for Baten Kaitos was Masato Kato, best known for Chrono Chross? It's obvious once you know!)
So yeah, it was another ancient game from the pile and it's cool to have it done, and to just... see how that kinda neat but very slow game I played back on gamecube turned out.
12. Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem (DS, 2010)
I still remember being so mad Nintendo opted out of localizing this. Still am a little, despite finding the game just okay. For starters this would have been easier to appreciate circa 2011. But yeah, I do this this works for what it is, a way of taking the original Marth and his Marth Plot and digging into what Marth has to be to make that work in the long term. Lotta really silly retcons have to happen to make that happen but once they get there I do appreciate that, relative to when the original came out... yeah, I see why FE3 succeeded in ways the games before and after it didn't really.
I think the only other FE game to reward just using your jeigans as much as this one is Fates? Like this game is just completely unafraid to hand you a promoted unit who is better than your trained units, and the biggest exception is easily fixable statwise. Or maybe I just find it funny to let Char keep running around I dunno.
I will say I wish they gave more to Caeda, she wasn't half as funny in this one as she is in Shadow Dragon, but otherwise yeah, I do get it.
11. Fire Emblem Fates: Revelation (3DS, 2016)
Revelation is weird because I can look at the skeleton of this plot and say "yeah this makes sense, I like this as a third route, it feels like a proper culmination of the game" but also they make so many decisions that are in the vein of the FFVIII Orphanage Scene: I see why you did this but there were several other, better options to get there that would have raised fewer questions. And honestly the map gimmicks were... a lot!
But despite that I do find myself thinking more fondly of it than New Mystery? Fates, for its flaws, is deeply earnest, and there's a lot of deep tragedy in this game that's compelling even if it never quite gets to breathe as much as I'd like.
10. Sonic Superstars (PS4, 2023)
I like the stages in this a lot, the odd wonky physics aside, but a lot of the bosses are a big whiff. They have a good sense of weight and speed, and there's a lot of fun pieces. A few bullshit stages here and there but honestly less than, say, Sonic 2. Overall feels like a definite advance from what they were doing in Sonic Mania on that front.
I didn't quite beat it honestly becuase the final boss is just... kinda bullshit? I hate that there's no checkpoint of any kind between the two stages of it because the end of that second fight has an instant death trap that's easy to be out of position to dodge, like you can just be be-motion and not able to get enough speed to outrun the pit in one part, it's terrible. But before that point I was having a good time.
9. Super Robot Wars V (Switch, 2017)
Probably the overall weakest SRW I've played, but still does SRW things. In part it's just that, having played it after X, T, and 30, the rougher translation and missing a few mechanics that were implemented in those games stood out. It also just had somewhat weak implementation of the series I knew well, and it kinda put the series I wasn't as familiar with on route splits I ended up not taking. You can miss an awful lot of FMP in particular.
But gosh it's fun to get to those maps where the Yamato is at full power.
8. Rhapsody II: Ballad of the Little Princess (as part of Marl Kingdom Chronicles, Switch, 2023)
The songs are a little better distributed than in the original, but nothing really hits as hard as Cherie's song. Now in most other respects this is just a better game, using puppets basically like WA3 mediums makes for more interesting gaming than just having puppets to juggle, you have more variety to your abilities and such, and the different systems work better together, but it still feels like it kinda loses what makes it distinct in the final stretch. The use of cut and paste dungeons is really obvious and distracting and there's definitely segments that exist just to stretch out the game.
I'm also not entirely sure why they felt the need to repeat the overall story beats of pining after some guy when you already have Crea right there, but maybe the third game figures out its mistake to some degree.
7. The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog (Steam, 2023)
Delightful shitpost of a game. Like this is something that you can do in an afternoon and it's basically free and yeah, it's just a neat little thing. You wander around as an Original Character Do Not Steal, hang out with the Sonic cast during Amy's birthday, which Amy set up as a murder mystery, except oh no shenanigans! And it's just fun to hang out with these dorks and watch them be dorks. Shadow especially is wonderfully Tsundere.
6. Fire Emblem Engage (Switch, 2023)
Engage is a good game that's frustrating because I feel like it could have been a great game. Some of the issues actually WERE helped, but even if you can get supports at a decent rate now it's hard not to see the ways this game could have really shined with just a few alterations.
And that is somewhat unfair because there is plenty of good game here. The investment in giving maps a variety of goals, balancing gimmicks with core map layout, and having side objectives frequently is something that's felt light in the series for a long time. The Emblems are fun even if I think they're a little too overcentralizing, and the way the game grants and restricts access to them is well handled. I really really like chapters 10/11 and 24, they strike a great balance of creating tension in both story and map design.
But also the focus on found family really falters with the weird choices they make with the villains and not investing enough in Alear and Veyle's relationship and attributing parts of it to their blood relation. I feel bad always having to undercut the compliments I give the thing but it really just stands out to me more how mixed it was despite my overall high opinion.
5. Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line (Switch, 2023)
To an extent this does just make me miss Curtain Call, I found the stylus controls a lot easier to work with and I still just don't have the knack of certain techniques with the button configuration the game uses. But gosh there's been so much good FF music since Curtain call came out! The series mode is kinda whatever, but if I was a bit more practiced at button controlled the overall difficulty options and expanded song roster are definitely big boons. It's really very much Theatrhythm, but More.
4. Persona 5 Strikers (Switch, 2021)
So I'm gonna lead off with: I do think Persona 5 is, overall, stronger. I like jRPGs, I think P5 investing in dungeon design made it one of the best of this era I've played.
But it's wild the degree to which the vibe of this game is "What if we made Persona 5, but this time we picked a tone at the start and stayed at about that level the whole game. Also Haru is allowed to exist." Seriously there is just a great deal of 'Persona 5 Redo' to this game, it arrives at almost the same final boss through a different route, it's going for a lighter tone so it presents its villains as victims more than stand-ins for societal evil but fundamentally their presentation and the structure of how you do the dungeons is the same, it's Persona 5, but streamlined. So that's cool.
Because of the way they blended Musou with the more deliberate dungeons of P5 and the attempt to give it the vibe of playing in the press turn system, there's some stuff you can do that just kinda turns into win buttons, at least on Easy. It turns the game into more of a resource management system, which exists in P5 but there it's more about how much time in terms of the game calendar you're willing to spend, whereas this is more about managing resources within a fight or between save points (which just kinda let you retreat then go back in). Honestly I rarely thought to do it as much as I should have, just because... it's Persona, you gotta do the dungeon in one segment!
Also like. It's a reasonable length. That's nice! I miss games that had those.
3. Devil May Cry 5 (PS4, 2019)
This is my favorite of these and it's not super close. Normally in a DMC-type game I hit a point where I'm violently reminded I'm bad at these games and the way you're 'supposed' to play doesn't click for me or I just don't really have the dexterity to reliably execute the gameplay. While I am still bad at DMC, I kept finding that any time I felt a bit off in combat, like I didn't like the way I was moving, I could just pop into the skill shop and oh, hey, there it is, the thing I was missing! I do think that yeah, if you're here with a little more in-depth knowledge of the series then V must be a pain in the ass to play through because he's kinda. Nerfed. On purpose. But still, the overall vibe feels great and I do think that, in part, just getting to play a very focused game like this that's still modern despite it's exactly-like-the-old-days chapter structure helps it stand out. They don't make games like this very often and that's a shame!
2. Final Fanasy VII Remake (PS4, 2020)
I still, STILL see people just... so fucking angry about this game and I just want to smack them. "They promised the original game but with modern graphics" fuck all the way off. Like I respect the idea of "hey it kinda sucks we got basically a third of a game" a bit, even if from a gameplay perspective I do think FFVIIr is a fairly compete experience, like yeah even allowing for the inflation of development effort and timesink that modern gaming causes relative to the PS1 era they really just don't get THAT far into things. And while many of the additions to feel like making the game feel more rounded and adding texture to the story and characters, there's some just pure padding here. Some of it isn't bad, but it's padding.
But god, the vitriol some people bring to this is infuriating at times because there's a lot of love and stuff to love in this game. I suppose if this is your first exposure to FFVII you might not get to believe in the lie Cloud is telling himself quite as long, but since this is a sequel it's cool to see them spend the extra time digging into just how much of a tryhard nerd Cloud is. They definitely updated Barret's character a fair bit, but I like this Barret a lot more. This game supports AerTi, a thing that just is not true of FFVII!
But yeah there's just so much care and craft in this game and I'll see shit like "Nomura should be put on a LIST for what he did to FFVIIr", I kinda want them to go more off the rails just to spite those people because god knows they will be completely unable to go 'ah this is not what I wanted' and just ignore the further games.
1. The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure (Switch, 2023)
Crossbell is, overall, the strongest arc of Trails, partly for its stronger focus, partly because it's only two games, partly because both games feel complete but with material to build on later. But what stands out in Azure in specific is how well they're able to pay off the prior game, and how much all the intricate plotting is just a nice bonus because what we're here for is for our heroes going from a determined scrappy bunch here to save their daughter to outright righteous anger as they realize how much absolute bullshit the villain gang has been feeding said daughter, and how their entire plan hinges on making a little girl the sole savior of the world while they shunt all the responsibility and reap all the rewards.
I dunno I feel bad not having more superlatives here. I just like games of this vintage, of this style, and they rarely make them quite this well. There's better games from its original vintage (c 2011) but not many, and most of those lacked the sense of place Crossbell has. Sometimes I worry that looking more at late-translations and remakes is a bad sign in some ways. Then again I do have like a hundred video games to play. Maybe I should worry less.
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