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I recently beat Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth which still this many years later is so unique. There’s nothing else like it. I wonder why no one ever (successfully) worked with its ideas again because there’s plenty to improve or expand upon. I ended up buying the newish game, Valkyrie Elysium, even though I heard it was mediocre and not like the old games. It was cheap for black friday.
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Nov 24, 2023 17:25
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 20:16 |
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I beat Pikmin 4! It was amazing! In '23, I played Mario Wonder and thought it was just ok. While I liked Zelda, I didn't love it like many. I thought I was maybe getting old and Nintendo wasn't doing it anymore. But I loved Pikmin 4. I played it for 31 hours and found everything. I started on a plane trip but unlike other switch games, I kept at it at home instead of waiting on my next trip. There's a cute dog. Long underground tunnels. It's a little repetitive by the end since it's so big and pushing against the bounds of what pikmin can be without getting unnecessarily complicated.
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Jan 31, 2024 16:24
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I beat Enclave HD. This is a remaster of an Xbox game. From 2002? I had never heard of it. I found that weird because I owned an Xbox and this game would’ve been right up my alley. In effect, it’s like I’m playing a brand new game from a 20-year old design era. I’m fascinated by late 90s/early 2000s 3d games because they were made before many of the standards of today were developed. Ways of movement, level design, collectibles, character upgrades—even UI elements—all fit into a few buckets used across most games that come out nowadays. That wasn’t always true. Enclave is a linear, level-based action RPG with both a good and evil campaign. I don’t think that style was ever common. It doesn’t seem to exist anymore. Levels are seen as inherently inferior to open world by most. Enclave also borrows a 3d platformer economy by hiding bags of gold throughout the levels, which aren’t super complex but have enough variance and alt paths to keep them interesting. You can find maps to bonus levels, too. Gold increases your loadout capacity. The more gold you amass, the higher tier weapons, armor, potions, etc you can equip. You start as a basic knight but in several levels you rescue other character classes who you can then play as (archer, druid, engineer, etc). The evil campaign has counterparts who match the enemies you fight as the good side. A neat touch. The story is basic fantasy but also weird. As the “good” side, you start off in jail because you refused to pay the kingdom’s exorbitant taxes and as a reward for fighting off the baddies, you’re allowed your freedom to save the land for the potential reward of. . . not going back into the dungeon. I was happy to stomp those fuckers as the bad guys. The biggest con is the controls, specifically the melee controls. It’s hard swinging your jank rear end sword in inexplicable patterns in a world where several Dark Souls games exist. It’s best to abandon melee ASAP to play one of the ranged characters (I played most of the good campaign as the druid, all of the evil campaign as the sorceress after she's unlocked) and only come back when you have much better weapons to equip on the halfling. She is best because she’s fast and can bait a swing then attack, backpedal and bait, attack, backpedal and etc. It looks like this:  I kept expecting the game to either introduce a horrendous platformer section (common to the era) or a major difficulty spike. It skips the former and only sort of engages in the latter. The penultimate level is a pain in the rear end but not insurmountable, and I was playing on hard, since I read that that was the original Xbox difficulty. There’s a handful of bullshit insta-kill parts. When you die, you have to start the level over. Levels are short though, especially when you know where to go. There is one level late in the evil campaign where if go through the exit portal—the same portal you have used for nearly every level so far—the boss NPC who has been giving you missions betrays you and instantly kills you. You have to play the whole level again and go around it to a new, different portal. This is hilarious. Game’s just don’t troll you like they used to.
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Feb 23, 2024 01:44
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Jossar posted:Ah Enclave, very much the archetypal example of an Action RPG that I 100%'d and then 100% forgot about. Does the HD remake still include secret characters if you beat all the campaigns/collect all the gold? Yep, and the final two are packing rocket launchers.
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Feb 23, 2024 02:43
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Hakkesshu posted:If you want a similar game that feels even more like Dark Souls, check out Severance: Blade of Darkness. I believe there's somewhat modern HD version of it as well - that game feels extremely like a prototype Souls game, but with much clunkier movement. Still really fun, though. I haven't played it yet, but I actually own the Severance remaster due to an article I read that basically said the same: It's a proto-Dark Souls and also one of the most underrated games of all time. It was only a few bucks on PSN at the time. I hadn't heard of that one either but it makes more sense since it was a PC game and I had poo poo PC's for a while. I'll have to dive into that soon.
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Feb 23, 2024 19:28
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 20:16 |
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I just beat Dungeon Munchies This is an odd one. I thought it was a metroidvania when I bought it, but it’s actually a linear platformer with a heavy story emphasis. The controls are floaty, slippery, and overall imprecise. It took a while to get used to but the game never requires precision so it works out. You’re a zombie reanimated by a necromancer so that she can teach you to cook. By teach you to cook, she means slaughter everything in your path so you can use their pieces to make dishes and weapons. Both work as a loadout. You’re allowed a limited amount of food buffs as well as one primary and one secondary weapon. So you might kill a crab and use their claw as an axe, their shell as a shield, and cook food that improves axes and blocking. I spent most of the game with daggers that caused bleed or poison and buffed DoT damage. You swing/shoot your weapon in the direction you’re holding the left stick, making this a one stick shooter? So far what I’ve written is pretty negative, but the game actually works. At first, I’m like, what the hell is this slippery movement, why does this game have a 10/10 on steam? But then I eventually ended up zooming along not giving a poo poo, making everything explode, and laughing at the item descriptions. The story is funny and charming too, taking on the question of why go on living in an extremely lovely world. The game was released in early access and at least on consoles, the third act is extremely unfinished and buggy. Some of the last boss’s attacks were insta-killing me and others were doing 0 damage. It was also the only spot in the game where I couldn’t go back and adjust my loadout. I barely made it through.
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Mar 18, 2024 19:51
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