What games are you playing 2024? Battle strength determined by frilly outfits

[Dark Holy Elf]

Unicorn Overlord

Beaten. Around 75 hours, Level 40-43 or so.

Had a lot of fun with this one. I think from a purely tactical perspective the game could definitely be better, but I get it; this is an incredibly difficult sub-genre to do well-balanced combat for and all things considered they still manage okay. But really, there's just such a joy in tuning squads in so many ways to respond to threats the game presents. I can't say enough good things about how the game is very public with how everything works and wants you to interact with it. Definitely just an unexpected joy of a gameplay game. I averaged over 2 hours per day until I beat it which is pretty unusual for me.

Lovely art/sprites. I do wish the story were better; that is certainly gonna keep the game out of the 10/10 range. But very fun. In a weird way, despite the obvious genre difference, it reminds me of a Warriors game... not quite as mechanically tight as some of its competition, but extremely playable. (The mix of different sizes of maps also calls the mind this comparison.) Will definitely play again at some point, and it's a good sign when I'm saying that so quickly about a 70+ hour game.

[Cmdr_King]

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth- Fin

Okay so.  There's some parts of this game that smack of lacking confidence in itself and in the player to be willing to roll with what flows naturally in the game.  This is most pronounced in the beginning and parts of the endgame, where it feels like the game is afraid to just not have a driving force moving the plot along beyond "hey Sephiroth is out there, we should figure out what to do about that" and insert action sequences that just don't really jive with the overall mood meant to be set in this portion of the story.  Like yeah, Shinra is a problem and they do rule the planet, but there's a big gap between their city and the rest of the world in how they exert control.  And there are some changes to the big plot modules that don't always work, like I'd say Cosmo Canyon is just overall weaker as a sequence, despite Nanaki's arc being drawn a lot more sharply. 

On the flip side the game's propensity for bombast sells the hell out of other sequences in a way that's amazing.  FFVIIR-2 basically pauses every hour or so to rip your heart out, and at least one time does it so much harder than the original game I was floored by it.  Just a fantastically well-composed scene.

As a game unto itself it feels a lot more able to stand alone than Remake.  Like, when Remake was being a remake it was good, and when it inserted gameplay to fluff out Midgar to a complete game it was kinda the weakest parts of the game.  Now, the stuff with Avalanche being real characters, that was good, but making Hojo's lab an entire Resident Evil Mansion of new dungeon is... a lot.  Making the Shiny Golden Wire of Hope a whole dungeon?  A lot.  Remake has its share of "this did not need to take 2 hours" dungeons but it a lot better about adding gameplay to sequences that were really short in the original, and as you might expect when it has 'permission' to make a dungeon of doom it does it with gusto.  I think I spent more time in chapter 13, which is "Literally just Temple of the Ancients", than any other chapter but it always felt properly paced and appropriate.

So yeah no like.  Go ahead and play this game (once you can, since I'm 100% several of you are just waiting for a PC version).  Even if you felt like Remake kinda fell apart at the end, Rebirth is a lot more thoughtful about its new stuff and is a lot more satisfying about going off the rails for being more reserved with it.

[Twilkitri]

Logiart Grimoire (Steam)

Regarding the additional puzzles which were added in the post-early-access release, while it's still a bit annoying that they're not integrated into the main game structure, it turns out that they are still at least somewhat thematically linked.

Each of the puzzles is tagged with two or three keywords, often a subject along with an action and/or location, so this is similar to how the majority of the puzzles in the main game need to be unlocked by combining two or three of the other puzzles. For example one might have 'Cat' and 'To Cook' and the puzzle resolves to a cat in a chef hat using a cutting board.

And this actually leads to a lot of these puzzles ending up much more novel than I'm used to seeing in a while, so it was ultimately a good experience despite my previous complaint.


Anuchard (Steam)

Shortish action-rpg where you go into various dungeons to restore various people/entities and parts of the world.

It's trying for some amount of depth re cycles of history etc but ultimately I think it's a bit too short to really reach what it's aiming at. (And it's implied that all the characters in the game are literally the only people in that location, given a few of the events, which makes some of the later events not really make sense.) I did like some of what it was doing.

Never got especially good at the combat but happily it never got especially difficult. (The combat itself isn't particularly deep, either, so that could be a turnoff for some people.)


Dráscula: The Vampire Strikes Back (Steam)

Fairly bad old spanish-developed point & click game.

Crashed on me numerous times, had some issues with the english voice work. Some unfortunate 'jokes'. The interface is also fairly clunky.

The most annoying problem is that often exits which weren't otherwise interactable weren't indicated by anything - you would only know there was an exit if you clicked to walk somewhere and you changed location as a result. The prime examples being a tree, and a non-visible secret passage happening to be in a cupboard which is in the same room as a second, visible secret passage and where when you initially opened the cupboard you got an item out of it. (It also doesn't appear to really work with the geometry of the location, given the cupboard is against a wall with a visible corridor on the other side.)


If On A Winter's Night, Four Travelers (Steam)

Started playing this much more recent point & click only taking into account that it was well-thought-of and short, unhappily completely missed that it was a horror game which I am really not in the right state of mind for currently. Ended up being a much more discomforting experience than I was hoping for as a result.

That said, it's very polished and has some good sequences. There is one sequence in the third chapter that overstays its welcome a fair amount though.

[074]

Unicorn Overlord (complete)

8/10 game, I'm honestly extremely satisfied with this one and am willing to play it again at some point, but overall have some issues with the pacing in places.  I can accept a ho-hum writing job in a gameplay game, which this very much is, but there's just enough little problems I have that add up to some gripes overall.  I like the hell out of this game, I just think it could be better.

Probably the biggest is that it tries to have its cake and eat it too regarding the order in which you can deal with neighboring countries; giving you the illusion of freedom on that front while it's very much implying that you are supposed to go in a specified order.  This frankly could have been done better if they had gone further in either direction.  Either go for a fixed scenario order where you can have more in-depth storytelling or embrace the more open world approach they were teasing at.  Either could have worked, frankly.

I'm going to also take this time to vent a bit about how some of the localized chapters' stories played out.  Drakenhold's was probably the best fleshed out one.  The others didn't have enough time to cook - Bastorias could have gone from good to great if everything regarding Elgor and the Rat Bestrals wasn't constrained to a couple of encyclopedia entries and a last-chapter reveal.  Albion could have been decent had it expounded upon the small bit of local plot it got.  Elheim...good god Elheim was honestly the lowest part of the game, I don't know what the hell that needed.  I think ironically, Elheim and Albion suffered more from tying too much into the rather bare "collect the macguffins to do the big plot" aspect and not having enough of their own internal plot.  It also feels like the game needed one more chapter, so to speak where you could deal with the enemy using combined arms setups, but that may just be me.

Also Agrias Oaks syndrome is in full force here, don't act surprised.  Outside of a core few (mostly Scarlett, Lex, and Yahna), characters will disappear from the plot after the chapter they were introduced in is over, no surprises here.

I feel obligated to take a bit here to expound on just how much of a miracle it is that this game made it out in this level of quality.  Unicorn Overlord had a ten-year dev cycle, having originated as a PSVita title and going through not one but two large-scale refactors.  It basically limped across the finish line only because Kamitani funded the end of it himself.  I suppose to that end I can't blame its faults too much because there was barely enough money to make the game with by the end, so it had to be shipped out soon.

You know what games usually come out of those cycles?  Duke Nukem Forever.  Anthem.  Suicide Squad:Kill The Justice League.  Games that are just fucking terrible and out of touch with everything.  Shambling monstrosities that should have been put down years ago.  It's amazing that Unicorn Overlord basically beat the odds here and came out in the state that it did.

It's flawed, but I love it all the same.