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Blasphemous is a prime example of a game more people would get to enjoy if it had an easy mode. The art and music and voice work and overall atmosphere is sublime but it's buried behind some bullshit. Sure it's thematic bullshit about struggling against the horrors of that world, but not everybody likes or has time to suffer through a thousand deaths. In Bloodstained-adjacent news, there's a new game from the devs behind the Curse of the Moon games coming out in a couple weeks: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2081400/Grim_Guardians_Demon_Purge/ It currently has a demo and is very similar to them in play style.
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Feb 9, 2023 17:23
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Swilo posted:Blasphemous is a prime example of a game more people would get to enjoy if it had an easy mode. I'll be honest, I was all about trying it until everyone said how hard it was. I'm really bad at video games these days and play almost everything on Easy or Normal if I'm really vibing.
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Feb 9, 2023 17:47
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Medullah posted:I'll be honest, I was all about trying it until everyone said how hard it was. I'm really bad at video games these days and play almost everything on Easy or Normal if I'm really vibing. For what it's worth I was able to beat Blasphemous and I'm no super-gamer and have given up on most "hard" platformers that I've ever played.
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Feb 9, 2023 17:57
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As long as it doesn't have souls esque losing stuff on death I would probably gel with Blasphemous
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Feb 9, 2023 19:41
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Cat-shaped Witch posted:As long as it doesn't have souls esque losing stuff on death I would probably gel with Blasphemous You don't lose stuff but dying adds a cap to your mana and reduces the money/exp you get from enemies until you can reclaim your body or pay to have the status cleared
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Feb 9, 2023 20:01
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Blasphemous is a little harder than Castlevania but barely in my opinion Some of the late game bosses do require that you learn them as you would a souls boss. But what trips up people is that they just want to zip through stuff then they get impaled on a spike or fall through a pit. Go slow, take your time, and it's actually a pretty forgiving game. The checkpoints aren't too spread either, I think the lack of a dash makes people feel like they're farther away than they actually are RichterIX posted:You don't lose stuff but dying adds a cap to your mana and reduces the money/exp you get from enemies until you can reclaim your body or pay to have the status cleared I do think that this feature is tacked on and is completely unnecessary. But I mostly ignored it as having reduced mana isn't a huge deal in a game where melee is 99.9 percent of combat KingSlime fucked around with this message at 20:06 on Feb 9, 2023 |
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Feb 9, 2023 20:03
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Cat-shaped Witch posted:As long as it doesn't have souls esque losing stuff on death I would probably gel with Blasphemous Not in the base game, no. When you die, a small portion of your health and magic meters get locked away until you pick up your ghost, but you don't lose any experience/money (they're one and the same in this game). If you pick up your ghost, great, you're fine. If you die again, it locks another portion away, but it maxes out at half, all of which goes away if you get your ghost just once. And if your ghost is somewhere that you really just don't feel like going, you can go to a church and pay a small fee and you'll be fully restored. Eventually you can unlock the ability to do this for free. After you beat the game once, you unlock some additional modes that change how the game works, and one of them includes the Dark Souls "all your points are on your ghost" mechanic. So it's like an optional hard mode you can enable if you're feeling frisky.
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Feb 9, 2023 20:08
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I got a few hours into Blasphemous, realized it was just a Soulslike and not a Metroidvania, and dropped it. I have very low patience for that gameplay loop these days, even if you don't really lose anything on death.
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Feb 9, 2023 20:35
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I will say I am getting as tired of "the game is a metaphor for how life is painful, relentless, unrewarding struggle" themes as I am of "the game is a metaphor for depression" Like yeah dude, I know, I have depression and I know the world is difficult bullshit, I live there. Give me something where the theme is life gets easier when you collectively annihilate the rich.
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Feb 10, 2023 00:02
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I didn't get either of those two things from bloodstained or blasphemous. Well blasphemous added a satisfying ending with the last DLC, but before that yeah, technically the story/your struggle was pretty hopeless and grim dark
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Feb 10, 2023 00:08
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Oh that was more a general remark about games as a whole right now. I feel like it's becoming a rather cliche trope to make a game that is often brutally punishing and not terribly fun because of it and handwave it like "oh well see you're supposed to be having a miserable time, thanks for the money though"
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Feb 10, 2023 00:11
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To be honest I'm just tired of Ruined Kingdoms populated by the rapidly decaying remains of civilization. Show some alive places! Also burned out on 'lore is given through random missable items' poo poo because FromSoft is the only one to remotely make that work
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Feb 10, 2023 00:33
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Similarly, there's a reason I don't play Souls games - and it's because I play games to have fun, not to throw controllers at walls. I work retail, I have a surplus of insurmountable problems and frustrating tedium in real life, I don't need more in my escapism.
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Feb 10, 2023 00:34
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Commander Keene posted:Similarly, there's a reason I don't play Souls games - and it's because I play games to have fun, not to throw controllers at walls. I work retail, I have a surplus of insurmountable problems and frustrating tedium in real life, I don't need more in my escapism. It gets better, I did Best Buy for 13 years before I found an out. You'll get there!
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Feb 10, 2023 00:38
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ImpAtom posted:To be honest I'm just tired of Ruined Kingdoms populated by the rapidly decaying remains of civilization. Show some alive places! it's incredibly tiresome having nearly every narrative in every game in even the same vague mechanical or aesthetic mould of the souls games boil down to, "you gotta go do X thing for Y reason, good luck," which is then padded out by giving you the equivalent of trying to figure out the plot of a novel by browsing through its TVtropes entry it's obvious why they do it - it's a dirt cheap method of storytelling compared to having actual voice actors and writers, and the vagueness helps to generate continuing interest via youtube lore hounds - but if your game doesn't have the same mechanical and stylistic qualities that make fromsoft worlds memorable, then that method of narrative typically fails to generate many emotions outside of perturbed confusion
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Feb 10, 2023 00:46
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I didn't think any of blasphemous was unreasonable. it has some rude areas and it's more on the challenging end but nothing felt like complete bullshit. a few parts were definitely rough around the edges when the platforming wasn't as good, especially when a missed jump is instant death and way more punishing than fights where you won't die in less than 3 hits, but the devs made some good improvements there and when I replayed it on the NG+ mode they added it felt more polished.
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Feb 10, 2023 03:46
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SlimGoodbody posted:I will say I am getting as tired of "the game is a metaphor for how life is painful, relentless, unrewarding struggle" themes i don't think there are actually a lot of games about that blasphemous is actually really specific in its themes about catholic guilt and Inquisition politics Augus fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Feb 10, 2023 |
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Feb 10, 2023 19:22
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Augus posted:i don't think there are actually a lot of games about that I feel like it's been common in the indie game space, and crosses over with "oh, it's about depression" games sometimes. Examples I can think of are Getting Over It, Jump King, Celeste, everything Fromsoft has done for the last twenty years, Returnal, and certainly others that are slipping my mind at the moment. And to be clear, I love a number of those games (Returnal is superlative and everyone should play it). I'm just noticing a theme I feel has been sufficiently explored.
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Feb 10, 2023 20:23
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Celeste is not that brutal it's pretty fun... your character is cute and is pleasing to move around. Getting Over It and Jump King are meme games. And they're all from the ultra-hard difficulty ~2018 era that's kind of over anyways (see spelunky 2's reception for people no longer having patience for this crap). I remember enjoying Bloodstained because it was nice to have a high effort platformer that wasnt gratuitously difficult because gratuitous difficulty was a big fad at the time but I think it's mostly over. No Wave fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Feb 10, 2023 |
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Feb 10, 2023 20:33
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SlimGoodbody posted:I feel like it's been common in the indie game space, and crosses over with "oh, it's about depression" games sometimes. Examples I can think of are Getting Over It, Jump King, Celeste, everything Fromsoft has done for the last twenty years, Returnal, and certainly others that are slipping my mind at the moment. And to be clear, I love a number of those games (Returnal is superlative and everyone should play it). I'm just noticing a theme I feel has been sufficiently explored. surmounting emotional turmoil just happens to dovetail nicely with the goal of most video games (struggling through adversity to win), and it's an easy way to punch up a thin narrative by creating a more personally emotionally resonant link with most players not that i think indie devs are being cruelly manipulative or whatever; it just happens to be an excellent tentpole theme for games, and so it's easy to see why most of them pick it
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Feb 10, 2023 20:34
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saying from's games are about "life is hard" is pretty reductiveVermain posted:it's obvious why they do it - it's a dirt cheap method of storytelling compared to having actual voice actors and writers, and the vagueness helps to generate continuing interest via youtube lore hounds yeah and metroidvanias started having backtracking because it saved space on the cartridge. being economical doesn't make it bad. Augus fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Feb 10, 2023 |
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Feb 10, 2023 21:16
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Augus posted:saying from's games are about "life is hard" is pretty reductive It definitely is, I'm being a bit hyperbolic there cause those games are about a bunch of different things simultaneously, and contain some of the most artful use of theming in any games ever. But you can't deny that the predominant theme of Souls games is Relentless Struggle.
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Feb 10, 2023 21:48
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Getting over it with Bennett Foddy is a metaphor for being stuck in a cauldron and only being able to move around by using a sledgehammer as an oar
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Feb 10, 2023 21:54
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In dark souls your character kind of sucks to move around with but you have this incredibly broken tool in dodge rolls that makes you feel super cool when you abuse it to beat bosses. A lot of souls imitators forgot to add the part where you feel super cool and I think blasphemous suffers from this outside of the silly parryspam fight.
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Feb 10, 2023 21:54
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Augus posted:yeah and metroidvanias started having backtracking because it saved space on the cartridge. being economical doesn't make it bad. sure, but my argument is that most games that imitate the style don't have the substance backing it (re: fromsoft's incredible art direction and ability to set a specific mood) that helps to compensate for the paucity of storytelling otherwise present it's also not a strictly either-or thing, either: signalis has a satisfying narrative arc that obscures its true meaning behind its lore and worldbuilding, and piecing those elements together helps to make the core plot more fulfilling
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Feb 10, 2023 21:58
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Malcolm Excellent posted:Getting over it with Bennett Foddy is a metaphor for being stuck in a cauldron and only being able to move around by using a sledgehammer as an oar This makes so much more sense than my take, please disregard my prior statements
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Feb 11, 2023 00:17
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Oh yeah, I played Dawn of Sorrow finally, so I guess I'll give my thoughts. It was... alright? It wasn't bad or anything. It did a lot of the same stuff that Aria did. Some of it was better. MP regeneration and spell cost adjustments mean you can use more souls. Red and Blue souls are more useful in general, and a lot more of them are viable, as opposed to Aria where you could sort most of them into two categories; useful, and memes. But it also did some things worse. There are a lot of the same weapons but most of them feel worse to use, especially the big ones. I get that it wasn't  "realistic" for Soma to pull out and swing a sword that is larger than his entire body with one hand, but it sure felt good! Yellow souls also got a pretty big nerf that didn't feel particularly needed. And the story was... certainly there. A story was present. There were cutscenes, and characters, and the characters did things. And that's about all I can say about them.In the end, the best thing about Dawn were the bosses. They really nailed them here, in terms of both design and difficulty. Each fight felt like an event, and you really felt like you earned your victory. And the worst thing? Farming is somehow even worse, and more of it is needed. Like, way more. Aria was very generous; you could easily beat the game with weapons you found lying around. Not so with Dawn. If you want a good weapon, you'll need to do soul fusion, which means you'll have to farm for souls. And that's souls over and above the now three different souls you need to see the true ending. So you are essentially required to farm for a bunch of rare drops, in a game with lower drop rates across the board compared to its predecessor, not to mention a luck stat that does not work. Seriously, it doesn't work. Speedrunners have cracked the game and looked at the code and verified that it is essentially worthless. Aria also had a non-functional luck stat but, again, you didn't need to farm to beat Aria. You do to beat Dawn, and it doesn't feel good. So yeah, overall, a pretty mixed bag. After my first playthrough, I downloaded a version where the luck stat was fixed and had a much better time, but I wanted to experience the vanilla game first, or as close to it as I could reasonably get, and the vanilla game was... alright. Onto Portrait!
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Feb 11, 2023 14:31
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So Portrait was pretty great. The partner gimmick gave it a really strong identity, which is something that Dawn lacked, feeling mostly like Aria redux. It also pretty handily solved a problem that I was really starting to notice with this series, which is that there's really only so much you can do with the Scary European Castle setting. They put Castle in the series name, so they have to have one, but it's nice to branch out to other brands of horror shlock. They already had the Mummy show up as a boss in several games. Why not go to Scary Egypt? They had killer clowns in Dawn. Scary Circus! They had... uhhh... werewolves. Werewolves of London! Scary London, I guess? The point is, it's nice to visit other places. Apparently that continues in Ecclesia, so I'm eager to see where that goes.
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Feb 18, 2023 21:04
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Portrait is my favorite of the DS games, I love the painting gimmick and having two characters you switch between was a really cool idea. They did a good job giving them different playstyles.
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Feb 19, 2023 02:03
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Begemot posted:Portrait is my favorite of the DS games, I love the painting gimmick and having two characters you switch between was a really cool idea. They did a good job giving them different playstyles.
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Feb 19, 2023 05:28
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Zereth posted:And the enormous variety of cool-rear end subweapons. that all level up individually and have special max upgrade versions
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Feb 19, 2023 05:38
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Even the weird-rear end poo poo like "Drop a steel ball directly down" or "throw a pie" have their uses too.
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Feb 19, 2023 05:40
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The funniest thing will always be pies doing dark damage so the upgraded pie owns the poo poo out of Richter's ghost.
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Feb 19, 2023 08:36
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To be clear, Luck does work in Dawn of Sorrow. It's just that you need thousands of it.
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Feb 19, 2023 14:00
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Kanos posted:The funniest thing will always be pies doing dark damage so the upgraded pie owns the poo poo out of Richter's ghost.
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Feb 19, 2023 16:17
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Well, I'm shooting Emperor Palpatine lightning out of both hands as my basic attack, so Ecclesia is pretty rad so far.
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Feb 19, 2023 18:12
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Spergatory posted:Well, I'm shooting Emperor Palpatine lightning out of both hands as my basic attack, so Ecclesia is pretty rad so far. yeah the glyphs attack system in ecclesia is one of the best weapon systems in a metroidvania I think. At first it's a good hybrid of weapon and magic but then by endgame you can be full awesome spellcaster.
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Feb 19, 2023 22:31
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Grim Guardians: Demon Purge is out now on PC and consoles- in case you forgot, this is Inti Creates' not-Castlevania/Bloodstained game set in the universe of their GalGun series, and it has a more detailed pixel art style than their Bloodstained games, as well as a real-time partner-swapping gimmick: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2081400/Grim_Guardians_Demon_Purge/ The mixed reviews are mostly due to people presuming it's a metroidvania and being annoyed to find out it's not.
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Feb 24, 2023 06:42
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So wait, is that a classicvania then?
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Feb 24, 2023 06:47
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King of Solomon posted:So wait, is that a classicvania then? Yes. It's a classicvania style game.
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Feb 24, 2023 06:50
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