thelongestdamnreviews
The Longest Damn Reviews
tl;dr: One guy writes a bunch about games he plays.
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Rockman EXE WS
I'm using a translation patch, so the title screen's been changed.
After going through Network Transmission, I decided to try the other Battle Network-flavored sidescroller platformer Mega Man, Rockman EXE WS. This game for the Wonderswan Color actually released a month before Network Transmission in Japan (almost to the day even), so I guess this game actually came first. For the first clear, it took me around 38 minutes, a second clear at 1 hour 18 minutes, 100% at 1 hour 23 minutes, and finally the third loop was finished at 1 hour 42 minutes. There is a translation patch that I used to understand the text and story too, thus the English in these screenshots. I'll call the game by the Japanese title but I'll use English names for characters and stuff, to keep it easier on everyone.
TLDR The Good
Great spritework - While the quality might not be equal to the GameBoy Advance, I was kind of impressed by how well-done the sprites were. Some enemies are different sizes compared to how they are in the regular Battle Network game, but you can still tell which one is which easily. Just be ready for them to attack differently than you're used to! MegaMan has a pretty big variety of sprites, from his aggressive pose becoming a regular standing animation to having a critical health pant, and every Style has one of these too! Even minor things like changing the shape of his Buster in different Styles wasn't glossed over.
Interesting concepts - Not only do you eventually get Styles that change your element as well as certain parameters, you can slot in up to four different chips for immediate use. Some chips are single-use, while others replace the Mega Buster with an infinite-use attack while activated and some others provide some sort of buff as long as they're equipped.
Replay value - Considering you need to go through the game twice to see everything due to the way the game's set up, there's a reason to keep going after seeing the credits the first time. I'm not sure if you can 100% the game in just two rounds, but three doesn't take that long either.
Though the elements change based on the Style, your charged shot will always behave the same even if using HeatGuts or WoodShield, unlike the home series.
TLDR The Bad
Please do stop the music - I'm not sure where the blame lies with this (the composer or the hardware) but it sounded like none of the songs had actual held notes, instead there was quick two-note warbling in quite a few songs. None of the songs really stood out to me, not that I played it for very long for any one to catch on, but I dunno if they'd be better if they were simply on a different system or what. Consider that the original GameBoy had catchy tunes and even the Mega Man games that didn't have ports of the NES games' soundtracks counted there too. What happened?
Level design/difficulty - I can't condense what I have to say about this to a short paragraph, so watch for the several later in the review.
The story flow is pretty messy - It seems to follow the basic plot of the first Battle Network (Lan receives MegaMan, they murder scores of viruses and Navis, they destroy the LifeVirus) but the way the mini plots of each stage are handled is jarring because there's no real transition. Like, you start one stage "investigating the net for WWW rumors" and you transition to one of the stage branches and suddenly Lan is on a train whose braking system is malfunctioning? What? But this too is tied back to the way levels are designed, so buckle up.
Didn't Battletoads have a stage where you stood on and climbed snakes ("Karnath's Revenge" I think)? That explains what the devs were going for on the difficulty!
Lan Hikari has just entered the fifth grade and receives a NetNavi of his own, MegaMan.EXE. Together, they thwart a Navi causing havoc in their oven and uncover a nefarious plot by terrorist organization WWW, and fight against their Navis and evil operators. In 2D! Again.
Though Rockman EXE WS is another sidescroller game in a series that is RPG based, it's not too comparable to Network Transmission other than a few things that are in common with both. A big departure is that the game is extremely linear--instead of picking zones to clear and having a general progression through the game, you have only a small number of stages you go through in a set order, though there are branches that determine what the second half of some stages are and this determines who you fight at the end of the stage. Because there are only two branches in stages 2, 3, 4, and 5, you need to play through twice to see the other version of those stages. You can't merely get to the end of one stage and then decide to play it again going the other way.
You still destroy viruses and sometimes get chips to use, but almost all of them are "single use and they're gone" types. The game thankfully will auto-reload any chips you use provided you have more in storage, but there is no money and no store so you're unfortunately stuck with what you find, and there is no Folder so chips are gone forever once spent. Some chips found lying in the field on their own are actually infinite-use, like the Sword series that replace your Buster with their chip, toggled on or off. There aren't any PowerUPs to find, instead some chips and all of the Styles mess with MegaMan's stats. HeatGuts increases his attack power, AquaCustom has a fast charge, ElecTeam has faster movement speed, and WoodShield has higher defense, with HubStyle having the buffs of the first three with reduced defense instead.
You can pretend you're Zero if you want, but Sword chips are a little hard to use since you can't walk and swing at the same time. You can still do a repeating two-hit combo on the ground and attack in the air at least.
There are also three "equip for effect" chips that apply their effect as long as they're in your loadout and aren't consumed on use. AirShoes increases jump height, AreaSteal increases movement speed (stacks with ElecTeam/Hub), and Undershirt increases defense (stacks with WoodShield and somewhat helps Hub). These are kind of like X series upgrades though you can take them off at almost anytime, like to keep AirShoes from sending you into overhead spikes when you need a short hop. While having any or all of them equipped takes up slots other offense/recovery chips could use, the tradeoff is almost always worth it. And since I'm on about chips, I'm not sure if there's an actual limit on the number of the ones you can carry.
A new feature of the game is your connectivity to Lan. You start with three "bars" and depending on stage factors, it lowers or disappears entirely. At one bar remaining, you lose the ability to pause and thus can't change chips or Styles, and at zero bars you completely lose the ability to use chips, even the "equip for effect" ones! All of these situations seem to be scripted so it's not tied to performance, and you gain all of your bars back in the hallway before the boss room and in the boss room too. It's not really a notable system but it can inconvenience you a little bit in a couple of places. Losing the ability to even pause is kind of ridiculous though.
Most stages start with a 'neutral' kind of theme and you then transition to an entirely different one at an arbitrary point, and this is one of the problems I had with the game. There's no warning at all when you come to a stage branch, other than there just being two ways to advance, and sometimes a branch doesn't move into a new area but is just a side area to pick up an item before you go back to the main path. Stage branches are categorized by going up or down and you're left in the dark as to what you'll face on the other side, though people familiar with the first Battle Network can probably guess who either on the Navi taunting you on entering or by the way the stage looks. It's absolutely jarring to be in an area and then it shifts into something completely different just because you slid through a passage or something. Imagine if Castlevania games had zero transition corridors or even doors at all.
Hey wait, that’s my line!
I'm not really sure how cohesive the story is if you're not familiar with the first Battle Network game. There are story segments between stages, a primary reason to start the next stage, a small story section for each stage variant, and then back to the between stage story bits--but because of the branch system, you might have characters pop up you didn't see before, or you might end up with continuity errors like facing ElecMan near the end of the game and Lan knows who Count Zap is despite not facing him before. You can actually fight him early in one of the branches, but it's not a guarantee and Lan is never directly shown looking up WWW members or anything either. It's kind of like watching a clip show, where you have these "best of" moments presented without context and you'd probably be lost if you weren't familiar with the source material.
You have nine lives (continues) in every stage, refilled to max when you start a new one. You're going to need them. I found myself getting knocked into pits by enemy attacks fairly often, or I'd botch a blind leap, or so on. It felt like X6's level of unfair bullshit as opposed to NT's pretty difficult but still workable difficulty. MegaMan is pretty slow, I guess to account for the two speed upgrades he can get, and for some reason he seems to slow down when he hits the ceiling...and for some other reason, he seems to catch on the corners of some platforms like he can jump again to save himself, but that doesn't work. The stage layouts aren't as bad once you've been through once at least, but going in blind kind of necessitates save states, which I'm not ashamed to admit that I abused this time. Checkpoints aren't always generously placed, either.
*The Price is Right game over horns*
And the disappearing platforms gimmick is probably the worst in this game as opposed to any other Mega Man game I've played. Usually they appear in a pattern of two with them 'leap-frogging' through the sequence. Here, several of them only have one appear at a time, so you need to use the block to be where you need right when the next block in sequence appears lest you hit your head on it or have the block you're standing on disappear. SnakeMan's stage is great for this, and again you'll be going in blind the first time through so you'll need to redo that section more than a few times to not only get the timing down, but know where you need to be when the block appears. Not all of the disappearing blocks are this way, but then the ones in SnakeMan's stage aren't over spikes...
You can only get some chips by having other weapon chips, like to destroy a wall. Even in stage 2, Lan will point out a wall you can demolish with GutsPunch...that you get in the next stage if you go on the correct path. Later on, there's a wall you can punch with ColdPunch, which is just an Aqua-element GutsPunch, and actual GutsPunch does nothing! And back in stage 2, ColdPunch does nothing to the wall Lan mentions. Why is the game set up this way, other than to pad out playtime? Why can't you just use either one? There's a wall that requires a specific Sword chip too for no real reason. Said wall in stage 2 is actually why I had to do three playthroughs for 100% because I apparently didn't pick the most efficient order of branches.
Because there's no grinding and because you can permanently expend recovery chips, you better use as many lives as you can to learn the boss' pattern before you go all-in since you'll potentially put yourself into an unwinnable situation if you burn everything too early. This came up in NT too, but at least you had the option to escape and save and get more chips then.
Poor ElecMan can't beat Air Man! Also, I used WoodShield Style a lot in these screenshots, but I used ElecTeam a bunch too just for the movement speed boost. AreaGrab was the very last chip I got so I needed something to get me off of the default move speed.
There are six stages but you unlock a seventh after you finish the game once. You get to keep all of your chips and Styles for the second and future loops so you'll eventually have your pick of all the Styles and all, and you can apparently unlock a boss rush kind of thing when you finish and unlock its hardest difficulty when you 100% the game. I didn't bother with this. PharaohMan kind of, uh, gave me a terrible impression given how much of a difficulty spike he is so early in the game.
I really did like the Styles though, and being able to switch at almost any time made for some nice flexibility. The Mega Buster is probably the best weapon in the game, especially if you have an element advantage. Chips on the other hand are kind of hard to use considering the WonderSwan's control setup, so you'd have to take your hand off of the movement buttons to use/toggle one of the chips or finagle a good setup in an emulator like I did. That part kind of tapers off the more equipment chips you get, but it's still kind of troublesome. But yeah, I really wish there was another sidescroller Battle Network that had the best features of Network Transmission and EXE WS and the home series. But that's just a silly dream game I guess.
The WonderSwan itself. A to jump, B to fire, X1-4 to move, Y1-4 deals with the chips. An interesting control scheme since some games could be played vertically, but would probably come off clumsy on real hardware.
Overall, I don't think I can recommend this one. There are some nice ideas but they're put in a game with a pretty haphazard plot and malicious stage design in some places. It's very hard and I can't see a reason for it to be other than to pad out the game length since it can be finished three times in an afternoon, albeit with save states. Without, you'll probably be stuck for longer and I can't see your frustration levels staying low with some of the things the game throws at you. Nice ideas, but the execution just doesn't work for me.
They seem to have moved MegaMan's left eye (his left) down a little too far for the HubStyle mugshot so it kind of makes him look crosseyed. Maybe that's where the defense cut comes in?
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Mega Man Network Transmission
Mega Man Network Transmission is one of those games I've had forever due to buying it at GameStop back when they actually regularly stocked GameCube games. It took about six and a half hours to finish. Through the magic of emulation, I used an Xbox 360 controller and had to play around a little with the controller settings in Dolphin since the GC and X360 layouts are a little different.
Nothing serious, considering you never need to use either stick. Jump on Xbox B, fire on A, use chips on Y.
TLDR The Good
Callbacks to the Classic series - From the disappearing block puzzle in Ice Man's stage to having reversed gravity sections in Gravity Man's stage, people who are familiar with the Mega Man Classic games will see some nice references to the Robot Masters here in the stage gimmicks. Some viruses come straight from the Classic games and aren't found in the other Battle Networks!
Great music - Even the "basic Internet" theme is high-energy and gets you in the mood to beat the crap out of some viruses. Every other stage has its own theme and I found myself not really liking only a handful of tracks...amusingly enough, the remix of the home theme from MMBN was one of them.
Flexibility/Customization - Much like the BN games, you can stick whatever chips in your Folder, but there are no Chip Codes and copies of a single chip stack to a set limit instead of each taking up a Folder slot. Chips also helpfully tell you in what situations they can or can't be used (on the ground, in the air, on a ladder, while using a wire hanger) as well as how many MP each use burns. PowerUPs return for the Mega Buster to boost its damage, its rapid-fire capabilities, and enables/quickens charging too.
Shh, I X series now. The wire hangers show up in a few stages but there aren’t any vertical ones at least.
TLDR The Bad
Early-game hell - Your Mega Buster starts out horribly weak, you have a small variety of chips that are also weak, and said chips are your best means of actually killing viruses to get more chips. The first boss in the game can kill you in about four hits with the right Armor and mercy invincibility is extremely short. It's not that bad afterwards but it's far from the easiest sidescroller Mega Man game, potentially worse if you're not used to how chips operate in the context of the gameplay. Like having an MP meter but also so many uses per chip.
Some grinding required - You'll need to kill viruses quick and with little to no damage taken to get them to drop chips, and you'll need to pick up Zenny coins in the field to fund increasingly-expensive upgrades and other chip purchases. This ties back into the hard start but at least you can immediately use chips you pick up if you’re already using them, or once you shuffle your Folder if not.
RNG screwage potential - Just like the core series, you can still end up with a bad draw of cards in the Custom menu. You'll have to wait longer than in the BN games for the Custom gauge to fill due to the more actiony aspect of the gameplay, but you can get up to ten chips to show up on future draws and you can eventually find/buy FastGauge and FullGauge consumable items.
Trying something new here with the review format. Why not put some TLDRs on top?
It's been a month since Lan and MegaMan.EXE defeated the WWW's Life Virus and peace has returned to the land. But now there are rumors of an even worse virus making the rounds and a tainted vaccine that's making Navis go crazy. Time to jack in and uncover the mystery of the Zero Virus! Huh, where have I heard that term before?
TrustMe.exe has encountered a problem and needs to restart.
Mega Man Network Transmission is a mashup of Classic Mega Man platforming with elements of the Battle Network series. MegaMan.EXE runs, jumps, shoots, and slides through a variety of stages while navigating around traps and destroying viruses in his way. You place chips in a Folder and these are randomly selected when you call the Custom screen and you can then use said chips a limited number of times, limited both by what you find and buy but also the arbitrary limit the game sets. I didn't play one stage long enough to see if completely-expended chips were made reusable when you burned through the rest of your Folder, however. There's also an MP bar that limits your chip spam but at least it constantly regenerates. The elemental strength/weakness system is still in place and since this takes place before Battle Network 2, you still have elemental Armors to mitigate damage instead of Styles.
Hitboxes are pretty tight so I’m unfortunately eating the shock in this picture. I need a better system to take screenshots.
I mentioned earlier that the Mega Buster is lackluster at the start and it's telling when it takes you ten shots to kill a basic Canodumb, or three with maxed Damage. It gets better with more levels in Charge, to the point it almost becomes a gamebreaker because of how quick it is at max Charge, limited by a full-power charge having annoyingly short range and you losing your charge level when you take damage. When aura-equipped enemies start appearing near the end, your Buster won't be able to make them vulnerable so try not to neglect your Folder like I did.
Chips mostly behave the same as they do in their core series with several adapted to 2D gameplay, and there are still Program Advances too. Even a basic Cannon + Hi-Cannon + M-Cannon combo gives you ridiculous firepower that also makes you invulnerable for several seconds--and it only uses one copy of each chip in the combo! You can only have one active chip/PA at a time of your ‘hand’ of five and you use L/R to swap through them, or you can trigger Standby Mode and freely swap while the game is halted (though the Standby Mode notification blanks out most of the action).
Unlike the regular Battle Network games, you don't play as Lan at all. He shows up in the story and he tools around in his room when you're not jacked in, but that's it, no skating through the overworld this time around. Several characters show up in portrait form but otherwise aren't even given models. And speaking of models, every Navi you beat creates a toy figure in Lan's room of that Navi which I thought was a nice little touch. And because I don't really have anywhere else to fit in this complaint, the Japanese-only audio kind of got on my nerves and very little of it is actually subtitled.
The jack in sequence is kinda impressive the first couple of times, but you can’t seem to skip it--and you have to watch it in reverse when you jack out!
Stages are pretty basic Mega Man fare. Flat sections, sections you can slide through, ladders, enemies, spikes (that actually only deal 200 damage this time around so you can survive them after several HPMemory upgrades), instant death pits, the works! Work your way to the end of the stage and face the boss in a battle to the death. You're given a confirmation before entering the arena and almost all of them have a big health recovery behind the portal so you can heal up before duking it out. I oddly got Mega Man ZX vibes with the way you enter new stages from the central Internet stage (ZX) and where you pick from stages without knowing who the boss is beforehand (Advent). I mentioned the Classic Robot Master stage references but not every stage has them (SwordMan's doesn't seem much like the one in MM8) or the boss doesn't match the stage (ShadowMan's stage has the platforms from Guts Man's in MM1).
I generally get frustrated when taking on disappearing block puzzles, but none of them in this game were all that bad.
Progression starts you against FireMan.EXE as the first boss, then you have to track down GutsMan.EXE, and you're given small batches of stages to choose from before getting railroaded again. Navi difficulty is kind of all over the place--BrightMan was my bane yet SwordMan that came after him was no problem. Interestingly, you can slide between the legs of some Navis and come out unharmed. There's an area on the map where you can refight defeated Navis for their chips based on your performance. Some bosses have gimmicks like BrightMan’s shield and a counterattack, or GravityMan having a tiny vulnerable area while you manually switch gravity by jumping.
I found the game to be pretty hard, a bit more than the average Mega Man sidescroller. I've played every Classic game apart from Mega Man 11 and I still had a bit of trouble, like QuickMan's stage having instant-death lasers that never turn off once activated. There are other parts where you need pretty good timing on your jumps and your slides to avoid unnecessary damage. I wouldn't say the game is unfairly hard other than at the start so if you can soldier through that, you might be able to enjoy yourself. Lan will always notify you when you hit zero BackUps, so you should probably jack out to not only refill your extra lives, but also to keep everything you picked up during this outing. Having to work back to the boss room is a chore, but being able to exit a stage before defeating the boss is very rare in any Mega Man game.
You can’t seem to jack out during a boss battle and you can only save in Lan’s Room, so try to be careful!
And I did enjoy the game. Great music and fun familiar gameplay were a great combo, and it didn't outstay its welcome. Farm 10 DoubleJump chips off of the flying penguin enemies in WaterComp's starting area and you'll be able to explore a little more in the cyberworlds since there are no Mega Man X-styled permanent upgrades or anything. I found the controls to be pretty tight and there are a lot of chips to collect, a secret boss to unlock, and a variation on the ending too. If you're a fan of 2D platformer Mega Man games, you'd probably like this one. And even if you're more into Battle Network, the game isn't so hard as to be unfair.
And if you’re emulating, you can abuse savestates to get through the bank lasers. Cough.
More like, “I can feel wanton cyber-murder coming on!” in my experience.
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Diablo III + Reaper of Souls
I originally started Diablo III as a Witch Doctor when I first got it, but I put the game away for a while and eventually came back during Season 15 and rolled a Monk for it. It took just over 25 hours to get to the end of Act V, playing mostly on Hard with some Expert thrown in. This review covers the base game plus Reaper of Souls, but not Rise of the Necromancer. I played entirely on my own and since I had a seasonal character, none of the items or gold my Witch Doctor found could be used.
Diablo III is a bit of a different beast from the previous games in the series, mostly from Diablo II. It's more of an arcade-y experience I think. You no longer can allocate stat points (until level 70) and you no longer have three skill trees to balance your skill points between. Instead, the game automatically adds points to your stats and you unlock a new skill or a Rune that modifies it for every level up to 69 or 70 depending on the character class. I imagine some people cried foul at having player choice taken away in how their character develops, but you still have control over what skills are in use. You just don't dump points into skills to boost the synergy it has with the others you'll use.
You also unlock passive skills and slots to put them in.
Minor break in the long review, but the best times I had with D2 were with modded games and using PlugY to not only give me a ton of inventory space as well as over four million pages of shared stash, but I could reset my stat points and skill points at any time. Most of my playtime was during Normal difficulty and I had a bunch of builds, though not all of them were viable for anything beyond that. I know Blizzard eventually added a once-per-difficulty respec option, but I'm still not keen on the possibility of ruining a character by investing in the wrong skills/stats. You couldn't really freely experiment with builds unless you were willing to invest a bunch of time into leveling them and come to find out, Sanctuary really isn't a great Aura even when it's been leveled. And for what it's worth, the only time I beat Act V Hell was in Eastern Sun, using an Arctic Blast/Winter Fury Druid.
This still ended up being the most kills I got in one chain.
Diablo III lets you change around assigned skills and their Runes at any time you're out of combat, no need to use a consumable or anything. I really liked this aspect since it let me go hog wild with trying out different skills, combinations of them, different Runes, etc. I didn't need to look up guides to see if a skill that looked good on paper was still worth using or not because there was no risk in actually trying them out. You're given six slots (left mouse button, right mouse button, 1234 or QWER) to assign skills, and the game initially restricts you on which skills go in which slot, but you can change that with Elective Mode. This also allows you to use more than one skill of a given category in your loadout provided it's not an "only one" situation like the Monk's Mantras category.
Each skill has five Runes assigned to it, though you're only able to use one Rune per skill. Sometimes they merely buff the damage a skill does, sometimes they change other parameters like making the skill hit in a wider area or they change how the skill works entirely. For example, the Monk's Wave of Light summons a ghostly bell right in front of the Monk that deals pretty heavy damage to anything it hits. The Wall of Light Rune changes the damage type and makes it stun enemies it hits, while Shattering Light also changes the element type but also has the bell generate a wide beam of cold that travels and smashes into anything in its way. Its Explosive Light Rune creates eight flaming avatars of the Monk that then rush in their own direction while still dealing heavy damage, but without summoning the bell. Some Legendary items and some Set items can also change aspects of skills, like the Tzo Krin's Gaze spirit stone causing Wave of Light to drop the bell directly on the enemy instead of placing it next to the Monk.
Skills now run on weapon damage, though that's still derived from your stats as well as the actual stats on your gear. I found this kinda jarring but instead of needing a caster weapon for a caster class, you can use pretty much anything. So my Witch Doctor who could throw exploding fireballs somehow was doing more damage with it using a giant two-handed sword. Okay. Skills also use the weapon's attack speed, so you have to decide what balance of speed and power to run with.
Wonderful names for Rare items make a comeback, of course!
Once you hit level 70, you start gaining Paragon Levels. These actually give you points you can allocate across four categories with four attributes each (though you earn points for each category in a set order), and these too can be reset at any time for free. You can boost your primary stat, your movement speed, give points to resisting all elements, and even buff your gold find! Most of these stats can only be raised 50 times each but there apparently is no limit to Paragon Levels, though leveling naturally slows down after some time since you still have higher and higher EXP requirements for each Paragon Level.
Though the character sheet still has a tucked-away readout of all of your stats, all of those have been condensed to three categories that give you a general idea of your power--Damage dealing with damage per second, Toughness representing how much damage you can absorb before dying, and Recovery detailing how many points of Toughness a second you recover. Items still have the full stat readout too, but you can use these three categories to get an at-a-glance look at which gear would be better to use. Just remember that the game only cares about numbers when it comes to the comparison between the three categories--if you rely on Life Per Hit with fast weapons to stay alive, the game won't know that a Life Per Kill item isn't actually better for you even if the numbers are higher.
I found that items didn't drop very often for me on Hard, and I actually liked that, as ass-backwards as that sounds for a game in a genre all about killing things and getting loot from them. I still picked up everything, even white plain items since they could be broken down at the blacksmith. The inventory has been expanded to 10x6 and items take either one or two slots, so no need to figure out how to fit a 4x2 giant axe into your backpack. For me, this led to not needing to return to town nearly as often because of a full pack and I oftentimes came back willingly before I capped out because I found a waypoint or because the questline required me to come back. There are also three crafters in town who can create items for you, and you very quickly unlock the ability to make rare-quality items and the blacksmith can even make Legendary or Set items with the post-game recipes you can find.
Though the full CGI cutscenes are rare, the "moving drawing" ones are still pretty neat-looking.
With Reaper of Souls, beating Act V opens up Adventure Mode for all of the characters on your account regardless of their progress in the story. Here, you're given full access to all five Acts and their waypoints, and each Act is given five Bounties. These involve going to X area and killing Y many monsters, or Z specific boss, or surviving for so many seconds during an event. Completing a Bounty rewards gold and experience, while clearing all five of an Act's Bounties rewards a Horadric Cache which dumps a bunch of items, crafter recipes, and Blood Shards to use for the new Gambler. Bounties only last for one game session, so completing four of Act I's and leaving the game for a moment will cause all Bounties to reset.
Two types of Rifts open up as well. Nephalem Rifts put you in "random scenery, random enemy" environments and you go through killing enemies to fill up a meter that summons a boss when full, and then you're allowed to leave. You also earn a Greater Rift Stone, and Greater Rifts are much like Nephalem Rifts except their difficulty is determined by the Rift itself instead of the current game setting, enemies don't drop loot, and you're timed. 15 minutes is kind of generous, but Greater Rifts have access to difficulty levels well beyond what the rest of the game does. Clear it in time and you can win a Legendary Gem and are given opportunities to upgrade it or any others in your possession a number of times. Get a good time and you'll jump several levels ahead on the difficulty selector, as well as place well on the leaderboard that I ignored entirely.
A Greater Rift. Some enemies drop orbs that add to your completion meter, but you still need to watch that orange line with the hourglass as that's the timer you need to stay ahead.
Instead of having the "complete the game three times" difficulty loop of prior Diablos, the game starts with three difficulty levels and you unlock an additional 14 as you play. You're able to set the difficulty to whatever you have unlocked before you enter a game, but you can only lower the difficulty while in-game. I originally started my Monk on Expert but found the enemies too damage spongey on a new character, but I honestly could've kept it there once I had actually good gear. I found Diablo III pretty easy my first time through the story, not dying until I very smartly jumped from Expert to Torment III in Adventure Mode and got one-shot by the first boss I came across...seven times in a row. Enemies scale with your level but the difficulty levels boost their stats while also granting you more EXP and gold per kill. When I stopped to eventually write this review, I was sitting at Torment VIII but could probably push it up a little bit more.
I didn't really mind the story, but I was more of a "play the game, skip the story" player with the prior games. There are a couple of contrivances I rolled my eyes at, but I really enjoyed that your character actually has a personality and talks so much. You converse with NPCs instead of being a monologue-catcher and you say a hell of a lot more than a single line when entering certain areas or completing quests. You unlock three different companions of which you can take one along with you on your travels and they too have personalities and comments and you can even have conversations with them! I didn't try going through with other characters to see if the NPC interaction was mostly canned, but this was a nice touch for me. I actually tried to exhaust all of the dialog options with every character just for that reason to be honest, though the little blue asterisk above their head to denote a new topic might've been a driving factor too.
I didn't really have many issues with Diablo III. It being forced-online sucks because you can't really play in an internet outage or on the road without a hotspot, and that in turn kills off any ability to have mods. While I gushed about the characters having personality and all above, I also triggered their taunts (from killing a bunch of enemies in a short time) excessively often and I don't think there's a way to turn just those voicelines off. The first time through the game is probably where the game is the worst since you're probably a burning scythe with a monofilament edge cutting through demons made of wheat, but the ability to skip the story afterwards with any character more than makes up for it as does having a wider selection of difficulties. And I wish more games did at least the "postgame for everyone" option too. You're pretty limited on character slots (I had ten with the expansion) which wasn't really a problem for me, but I imagine people could be constrained if they had different builds or if they wanted Seasonal characters as well as their usual roster.
Bounties are definitely worth doing, even if most of these are crafter recipes.
I lucked out and got Diablo III plus Reaper of Souls for very cheap, but I'd say it's worth $15-20. The story mode is kind of short but it has pretty long legs to it. Six different character classes, a bunch of builds based around the gear you find and use and what skills and Runes you like, and a bunch of demons and other baddies to kill, recipes to learn, achievements to farm, challenges to clear... For me, Diablo III put more emphasis on actually getting out there and killing instead of doing research on builds so you don't permanently screw over a character with misplaced points and all, and you're even rewarded for not slowing down on killing mooks or breaking things. I didn't have way high levels of fun playing, but I actually enjoyed my time and didn't feel like stopping midway.
Normally, you can have one Mystic Ally out at a time. One Legendary item doubles the number, and one Set lets you have every version out at once...and these stack.
Though you'll need a battle.net or Blizzard whatever account, you can try part of the first Act of plain Diablo III for free with any of the original five classes.
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Tactics Ogre: One Vision (mod)
As far as I know, One Vision is the only mod for the PSP version of Tactics Ogre. The intent behind the mod was to balance things, make the OP things less so, change things around, make the game different but not change it at its core. This review covers v0.91a, the latest version available when I started playing again. There's now a v0.92 available as of August 15 2018, so that's worth consideration. Download is available here.
The first biggest change is that characters in battle no longer get 0.1 added to all stats when the class they're in levels up. Instead, classes confer a percentage of given stats at each level regardless of their taking the field or not. So if you have a character class change to a Lv20 Dragoon, they would have comparable stats to one who was a Dragoon from level one.
A screenshot of the patchnotes, but this is still a good guide to follow.
Hired generics also are set to randomly be set under four different base stat distributions, for frontline fighters with lots of STR and VIT, archers with lots of DEX and AGI, mages with lots of INT and MND, and all-rounders. You have to look at the blue bars on the hiring screen to tell what archetype they fit into, and they change each time you enter the screen too.
Magic changed substantially too. You're no longer able to use grimoires during battle, so you can't have your Warrior throw out Exorcisms when your Cleric is busy. If you want magic, you actually need to field people that naturally use it instead of stocking up on one-shot spells. Instill spells are now learnable Skills that cost TP and quite often I'd get an Instill off after moving and attacking someone instead of sacrificing my attack to power up. Elemental magic now inflicts Averse of the opposite element so it's possible to set up elemental volleyball combos with two mages. Reagents are no longer used and use MP/TP/sometimes HP to fuel them instead, though the buffing Ninjitsu still requires them plus a pittance of TP.
Healing got buffed. It now scales slightly with MND but it also heals a percentage of the target's maxHP as a secondary effect, but this won't happen when using heals to hurt the undead. This makes enemy Clerics straight goddamned bats because they can and will undo a lot of the damage you're dealing to the enemy leader and several fights field one or two in the very back. Enemies still have a ton of HP so enemy healers are priority one...or you can trick their AI and beat the crap out of another enemy in range so they heal that one instead. I seriously exploited this several times since rushing Hawkmen to deal with them was potentially fatal for my guys. Knights lost the ability to heal too so thankfully all of the enemy leader Knights won't tank and heal all the hurt you'll bring.
Oh, and resurrect magic no longer exists as far as I found. You can save someone from death with two new items, the Lifeline Gem that Shiftstones them from the field (but never to return), or the Lifeline Gem that revives the ally and restores their HP, but removes the user instead so you're still permanently down one ally for that fight.
Magic availability got shuffled around too. Wizards and Spellblades get access to missile spells, but Warlocks can only use indirect magic. Draconic Magic now uses the caster's weapon power in the damage formula and I often had it dealing the most damage between plain elemental magic and using the weapon normally.
Items got the biggest change. Gear is now normalized and every class of weapon or armor now does the same thing with higher tiers having better stats. So 2H Swords all deal damage with a chance to inflict Stagger, and they give a bonus to AGIL, so late-game ones would do more damage and give more bonus stats--weight and RT stay consistent. Armor is split between cloth/caster, light, and heavy. Light armors boost evasion, while heavy armors boost HP and VIT for soaking up damage. Ranged weapons have much higher RT values across the board, to make up for their users not moving as often as your frontliners.
The Cutlass, Khora, and Damasc Sword are all the same weapon, but their stats are different. I didn’t mess with crafted weapons but I imagine they break the ‘same thing, better stats’ pattern.
Crafting got overhauled, so instead of getting +1 gear that's clearly better than the original, you get sidegrades. 2H Sword sidegrades are heavier and more damaging, but come with an AGIL penalty, Hammers have a high change to knock a target back, Cudgels trade caster bonuses for bonuses fighters would enjoy, Fists damage the target's MP as well as HP, and so on. Armor is a bit different, such as light armor getting a slightly heavier and more protective version to heavy armor getting even heavier and tanky. Some caster armor is different, like the standard Wizard Hat's sidegrade having a sharp RES penalty but innate Absorb MP. Crafting also doesn't require anywhere near the dumb number of steps like the original game--Wootz Steel for example can be done in one step and crafting is intended to be 100% successful (but it wasn’t in the early chapters for me, so possibly a bug) too.
Purified Ore isn’t very cheap, but it beats repetitive stress injury.
And of course Skills got changed around quite a bit. Fortify, Strengthen, and the other +stat skills are entirely gone (though enemies currently have dummied-out versions applied), Instills are skills as said above, skills that level up by use do so much faster now (I got Steal up to 2 before the end of the game, even), racial skills are now changed around so you can't stick Anatomy on everyone now (so demihumans have a use for your team), and activateable skills were either changed in function or swapped around between classes. Some skills like Bash or Counterhit or Field Alchemy had entire tiers removed, so Bash/Counter start at 50% and Field Alchemy I grants you use of most items instead of slowly unlocking them through the four tiers. Status Effect resist skills are gone and -Proofs unlock much earlier, and they allow you to cast a 'free' single-target cleanse against that type too. You'll generally have more SP than normal since you're not dumping them into +stat skills.
Finishers were balanced and Brimstone Hail is no longer the be-all end-all it was in the original. Each one inflicts a status effect or hits twice, and accuracy or damage is determined by current TP.
And there's a bunch of other small mechanical changes like changes to RT, cost, range, area of effect, and so on. Many things have new names now too.
Some character sprites were changed. Catiua now wears blue pants, Vyce has a red coat on Chaos/Neutral, Folcurt has a new sprite, Sara and Donalto have different portraits and have permanent sprites like unique characters, Tamuz was made into an interesting hybrid Hawkman that has access to Orc classes and he ended up being a pivotal part of my team as a Juggernaut. Templar Knights were given distinctive colors so you could see at a glance what they were capable of--red Templars were either Wizards or Warlocks so could cast magic, green were Archers or Fusiliers, so they could snipe you, blue with a black collar was Cleric so kill them first, etc. Given how many you have to go through in the last part of the game, having this kind of information is extremely helpful so you don't need to keep checking all of the identical mooks to see who's dangerous and who is easy pickings.
Please brain enemies with your giant hammer, flying heavy armor man. He can get Battering Ram to ignore Rampart Aura, but flying units kinda do that already.
I think the difficulty as a whole was increased somewhat, mostly at the start when you have terrible gear and skills. For example, the very first real battle has Canopus join you as a guest...and he died my first time in that fight. Uh. Canopus, the gamebreaker, died in an easy fight. I wound up making Denam a Cleric and fielded a second one and I still had quite a few incaps. No deaths, but I had to use the Chariot more than a few times because things went south fast. The Chapter 2 Chaos fight against Vyce 1v1 wasn't bad with Cleric Denam, mostly because I used whatever to inflict Falsestrike and gave myself Truestrike, so I could whittle him down. The Chapter 3 Neutral fight to save Cerya was made easier by her being given armor and leggings, but I had more trouble with actually killing Oz than keeping her alive (since you can use Lifeline Gems to ensure your guest lives). That was one of the instances where I had to grind.
I don't really have anything negative to say about the mod. I had to grind a bit and that was off-putting, but I think that was what killed my interest in the original game. The changelog is set up logically, but there's no rolling "this is everything that's different as of this moment" sort of list, so you kinda have to read from the bottom-up to get an idea of how many changes there are. And there are a lot. The PDF changelog is 67 pages long and 65 of them are patch notes, though not all of them are full pages. Still, there's been a lot of work done on this mod and it really shows. And it's not even done. It is kinda annoying to have to actively overwrite your own memory of "oh, well X is different than what I read a few minutes ago" while you read, though.
This isn’t a change that the mod made (as far as I know there’s no text alterations) but this is something that happened while I was going through a second route and I never knew this was possible.
The changes to gear kind of makes new tiers unlocking less exciting, not that they really were much in the original. Every standard upgrade does more than the prior one, but I don't really think it's a negative. The author has also tried to use the crafting system to give direct upgrades to some items that have big gaps between levels so that does help to keep things feeling consistent. I felt the light helmets gap between Circlet and Damasc Helm was pretty wide but that's something that can be addressed later. At least the system is otherwise pretty consistent instead of having one item increasing one set of stats and the next iteration increases something else.
One Vision is definitely worth a look if you're kind of tired of standard Tactics Ogre. I think it does a fine job of cutting off the chaff and streamlining things, but you should take some time to look over the extensive changelogs so you're not going to get your ass handed to you when the tried-and-true tricks of old cease to work. I'd suggest downloading a save that has classes maxed and so on so you can get a preview of all of the differences, if spoilers are no problem for you.
I honestly feel like trying a for-fun run where Denam only has monster allies for some reason now...
Edit: Hi, I’m an idiot and I guess I thought it was the same name as the Deus Ex mod, but nope! I fixed the name here almost a month after the fact.
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Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together
HAHAHA YES I DID IT I FINALLY BEAT THE GAME THE CURSE IS BR--
Uh.
I finally finished the game this time, clocking in a time of just over 58 hours for Neutral route cleared and not really many sidequests done. While I played this run with a mod (if you’ve played the game, you’ll notice in the pictures some differences), I'll talk about that another time. I should note that I've given this game at least five prior attempts each clocking in at over 20 hours over the several years I've owned it, so this is a pretty significant victory in my eyes.
The Valerian Isles have been in turmoil ever since the untimely death of her king, Dorgalua. He passed with no heir, and a regent installed himself into rule, although his influence only really extended through the northern part of the isles. The Hierophant Balbatos has enacted a regime of ethnic cleansing in the south against the Walister, your people, and your leader has already been captured. Worse, the knights who torched your town years ago are headed your way and the only help you have are your sister and best friend...
Five versus three against your favor, and they’re all veterans versus you all never having taken the field. What’s the worst that can happen?
I'll be making a few comparisons to Tactics Ogre's sibling series, Final Fantasy Tactics, during this review and I apologize for making so many. Tactics Ogre originally was a Super Famicom game and it was ported to the PlayStation 1 and Sega Saturn before getting remade on the PSP quite a while later. I've never played any of the old versions prior so this is mostly new experiences for me.
Tactics Ogre is a turn-based tactics RPG. Field a small team of characters in a variety of classes and fight it out through a number of battles as you clear a swath through everyone standing in your way. Warriors use big swords, Archers snipe with bows, Clerics heal, Canopus wins entire maps, Wizards damage and rebuff with spells, and so on. Objectives vary between "kill all enemies" and "kill the enemy leader" with very few deviations. Instead of the almost constant limit of five troops that Final Fantasy Tactics imposes on you, you can field a maximum of 12, but the limit increases or decreases based on the map, and even maps near the end of the game won't let you take everyone along. Enemy troops will almost always outnumber yours, but you have the advantage of human intellect, grinding, and the ability to revive your troops to counter them.
I’m apparently really bad at taking screenshots of actual gameplay, but the anti-aliasing on the text broke on the enemy’s numbers for some reason, thus the picture.
Though this is a modern-day remake, the game still uses sprites for characters and the battlegrounds, but instead of having the ability to freely rotate the map, you can instead tilt the map overhead for a bird's eye view to plan your next move. And in the process, it looks like the maps actually are 3D models textured to look like sprites. One of the final maps in the story is a translucent bridge situated over a glowing pit, and you can actually adjust the camera to look into the pit for no reason other than it looks cool. Spells also have been given a visual overhaul as have the weather effects in battle.
It might be a little jarring to have such advanced effects shown alongside sprites and pixel artwork, but they at least put the PSP’s hardware to work with these.
The biggest difference this version has to its prior incarnations or its siblings is how different the class system is. Instead of individual characters having their own character level and class level, the classes themselves level up and characters no longer have a personal level. If you have Warrior at 22 and change Denam from a level 5 Wizard to one, his level jumps to 22. More characters of one class fielded at the same time level faster, as do people of a lower level than the average.
It's an interesting system on paper, but it's got more than a few issues. While you can take a new character and stuff them into a leveled class to use immediately, you'll have to babysit anyone who switches to a new class since they'll be stuck using weaker gear until they get back up to speed, due to everything having a minimum level to use. Classes don't unlock too often so you'll have to decide if what new things the class can bring to the group are worth the trouble of grinding the characters back to effectiveness. EXP and SP are rewarded once the battle is won and it doesn't seem to matter what anyone on your side does to affect the final number, so you're not penalized for someone being dead weight. Battles where you have to kill the enemy leader can be useful for quick EXP/SP, but random battles never have these conditions.
Characters have personal reserves of SP used to unlock new skills and up to ten slots to stick into them. Skills either boost stats, like boosting defense or max HP or boosting ranged evasion, or they grant passive bonuses like weapon skills or racial skills boosting the damage done with said weapon/against said race, or they enable the use of certain spells like Fire Magic or Dark Magic, or they give your unit class-specific actions like Fearful Impact or Speedstar. New skills unlock slowly as that class levels, but not all of them can be transferred to other classes.
Some skills slowly rank up as you use them and weapon skills are no different. You’re encouraged to get at least one weapon skill up to 2 for every character to unlock heavily-damaging Finishers, so you can burst down tanky targets or other dangerous foes.
Unlike in FFT where you can reasonably allow your characters to access the skills of prior jobs so you could have a Knight with Black Magick abilities, here skills and spells and equipment is a lot more rigid. A Knight and a Cleric can both use Divine Magic to heal allies, but only the Cleric can use resurrection magic. A Knight can use Axes and 1H Swords, while the Cleric can't. They both can use Hammers, but only female Clerics get the sole Hammer the class can use. You kinda need to plan out your characters to minimize wasted SP. While it's not in short supply, it can be frustrating to want to try something new with an old character and then have several of their skills not apply to the new class. There is one special class that can use almost everything any other one class can use, but only one character can use it and it comes at a heavy cost, as well as said class learning nothing naturally. Think Freelancer or Onion Knight from Final Fantasy proper.
Combat is speed-based like in FFT. Each class has a base Recovery Time as well as how much RT is added per panel of move. Then this is all factored against the weight of the equipment you have on and the RT of the weapon. Unique characters (either fully unique or named generics) almost always have lower base RT than generics, on top of some having unique classes and dialog opportunities in some battles. Every class has HP for living and TP to fuel special abilities and weapon finishers that unlock once the related weapon skill is at least rank 2, but some have MP which start at 0 to prevent anyone from using their strongest spells on turn one, the same way FFTA2 does it. You're given a turn order on the bottom of the screen so you can try to manipulate the battlefield to your advantage, such as seeing if a character might be within range to kill a healer before they can act.
But if things wind up not going your way, another new feature to the game is the Chariot Tarot, an in-game turn rewinding feature. This unlocks in your first non-tutorial battle and allows you to rewind up to 50 turns backwards, and it even saves the 'alternate timelines' you created in that battle so if your original plan turned out better, you can jump back to it. The game records your use of this but you can do a same-turn Chariot free of charge, to perhaps try to aim a projectile spell another way or if an attack you needed to hit got dodged. The game points out that repeating the same actions the same way will only bear the same results, so if an Archer is having trouble landing an arrow for example, it might be worth it to same-turn Chariot by firing from every different tile in range until you make your mark.
I didn’t test to see how many alternate timelines you could make, but having the ability to rewind at all is pretty handy.
There are three story routes across four chapters, but they branch off instead of being three full stories from beginning to end. There is one Chapter 1, there are two Chapter 2s, three Chapter 3s, and one Chapter 4 where they all converge again. Law route has no branches, but Chaos can branch into Neutral at the end of Chapter 2. Each branch has its own story sequences, but the roles characters play in them might change. Someone who is an ally on one route might be an enemy on another, someone may live or die or even be recruitable depending on how you go.
Once you finish the game, you gain access to the World Tarot, which allows you to travel time forward and backward, jumping to Anchor Points while you keep your gear and roster. There are several Anchor Points sprinkled through each route's chapters, but you can't merely jump to a specific story battle at-will. Don't go back to the start of the game and expect to zero-effort everyone you find though, as enemies will now scale to your level and their gear will too. The World Tarot gives you an opportunity to replay story battles or to tackle another route too. Beating the game also unlocks the CODA section of the game, four short but new chapters made originally as DLC for this version of the game, baked into the release we got here. Progress through CODA requires certain characters to be considered alive by the timeline used to access it, so you may need to replay a good portion of the game to make the new timeline 'canon'.
You still experience the routes as if you were playing them the first time, so Denam won’t try to change history even further. Though one chapter in CODA does meddle with history to save a friend...
When not fighting on the battlefield, you can buy new wares in shops, recruit new people in shops, or craft new items if you have the recipes and materials. Crafting can make very powerful equipment even early on, but the biggest caveat is that the process is very tedious. You need to make advanced versions of materials one step at a time, and it's entirely possible that something will fail and you'll lose the materials in the process. I believe one piece of Wootz Steel takes over 30 steps and again, there's the failure risk to consider. You will be save-scumming quite a bit when it comes to crafting.
You can also auction off recruited monsters for money that you can then turn around and use to buy the meat and other items processed from their bodies! Somehow it’s even worse than FFT’s Poach/Secret Hunt because you’re doing this to members of your own team...
The last option accessed on the map is the Warren Report. This is like the Brave Story of FFT, but it allows you to replay cutscenes as well as see an overall timeline of when events happen, and it has bios of damn near everyone you meet and fight and kill. And they're not one-liners either--some enemies are nth generation knights or one pirate is actually pregnant (and you killed her, you monster), and so on. The Warren Report also holds all of the Titles you earn naturally by playing or by doing specific side goals (so Achievements basically), as well as tracking the number of battles fought, Chariot Tarot uses, number of escapes, number of allied KOs, number of allied deaths, and how many people you've killed as well as to which clan they were affiliated. And finally, it functions as a music player.
War is hell. All of those people you kill aren’t just faceless goons. Just...the ones with names are the only people who show up here as opposed to every generic person having a bio.
The music in this version has been given a full orchestral overhaul, given the 70-some names used in the credits for all the instruments, and several songs have been lengthened and given new parts. The Warren Report also lists composer notes about the tracks, saying what kind of mood they were going for or talking about how difficult it was to get specific instruments to meld together. The game has a percentage unlocked stat for the songs and I want to believe that most of them unlock by hearing them and winning the battles where they play, but at least one is unlocked by the Titles you earn.
Okay, so that's Tactics Ogre. Move your troops around the battlefield killing people until you win, then move onto the next map. Buy or make new gear and spells and buy skills to keep your team in top shape, and experience the story across three different routes.
It’s been a while since I last went through FFT, but it didn’t show you dead civilians a few times, did it?
What's good? There's a lot of content here. You can be sated with a one-and-done like I've done, but if you want to do everything in this game, you might want to set aside a couple hundred hours. There's a bunch of side quests and extra dungeons, and one of them is even 115 battles long. And you need to do that one in one go or you have to start over, but at least you can save between the fights this time. And to get the most out of it, you need to do it more than once. Yeah. There is a lot to do here, to the point where I'd say that no other FFT can come close. I hope you like grid-based turn-based RPG tactical goodness because this game is full of it.
And variety too. There are a bunch of different weapons for each type, a bunch of spells for each element, a bunch of skills for each class, and a bunch of classes for each race. Even monsters have classes! Though Golems and Dragons really only get to change, but demihumans like Reptiles and Orcs get access to some classes Humans can use, while they also get classes only they can use too. And then you have Hawkmen who scoff at terrain differences and can fly everywhere, but they can only use a handful of classes.
I'm a fan of the music. I now wake to the Warren Report theme as opposed to E.S. Battle from Xenosaga Episode II like I have for the past forever. And speaking of sound, the death cries are pretty lacking, especially compared to the PS1 FFT's anguished screams, but that can be ignored...even if you hear them quite a bit.
If you're into customizing your troops, then this game will definitely scratch that itch, even with the restrictions on the skills I mentioned above. There is actually a strategy revolving around recruiting enemies off the field in order to get their gear and to get their skills. When enemies die in this game, they leave either a bag of loot containing some of their gear or valuable coins, or they leave a tarot card that increases stats of whoever picks it up and said card becomes a usable item in combat. Instead of crystals you pick up to learn skills, you instead intentionally kill these recruits and then Scavenge their skills onto someone compatible. And this doesn't get into the ridiculousness of Snapdragons or Cursed Weapons either, of which I didn't touch at all.
There is some good scriptwork here too, though it has the same quasi semi-Elizabethan/Medieval bent the way War of the Lions did.
What's bad? Strangely, I felt like at least Chapter 4 dragged on a little too long, and that doesn't even count the multi-stage final dungeon. This wasn't the first time my interest flagged since at least two other runs have gotten to the final dungeon and I just...stopped. I imagine part of it was due to me somewhat rushing through the game (at a snail's pace?) and just wanting to finally be done with it this time, but I kinda dreaded the final part of the game since I knew it'd take a while--but I was wrong there.
There are several fights where you're unable to leave, sort of like Riovanes in FFT. You assault the castle's gates, then you enter the courtyard, then you break into the throne room, etc. You can always save into another slot in case things go south, but then you have nothing to show for your efforts other than a little bit of knowledge for the next try and a need to get levels/gear/skills up to snuff. The final dungeon is also set up this way, with maybe 12 fights if you don't take any shortcuts, and that many more you have to plow through if your team can't take on the last enemies. At least it's a nice touch that there are sometimes alternate routes to the same goal, and yes the Warren Report tracks each of these different approaches if you’re a completionist.
I mentioned crafting's tediousness, but that's at least optional. A major gripe I had with the shop was the inability to compare the stats between the gear my people had on with what the store was offering. So I'd save, buy a few things, go to the Party menu, compare, maybe reload the save and buy less or different things... I get that it's a remake, but a Fitting Room option really would not have hurt this game one bit. Because each tier of gear gives boosts to different stats, it's hard to tell how effective something would be until it's in your hands, and I found money tight enough that I couldn't just keep a copy of every weapon and armor on hand just for this reason. You can use the page feature to see if whichever class is leveled enough to use the item in question, but there's no stat comparison and stats are kind of important here.
It would have been amusing for people you kicked out to get revenge, but this never happens.
I didn’t like how you still couldn’t see your starting position and the enemy before you commit to battle, the same way that FFT did it but not either FFTA. Being able to change your gear or classes or skills or so on this way would’ve been a nice quality of life change, if to just make things a little less tedious. Like knowing if you should keep your regular gear on or swap to Baldur while diving into the Palace of the Dead, to exploit Baldur doing heavy damage to the undead.
So yeah. Tactics Ogre is pretty good. I think I still prefer the FFTs more but this isn't bad. It still plays like its sibling games, just the differences can trip you up a bit if you don't adjust to how TO works its classes and all. I think FFT and all are more accessible and more flexible, but if you've interest in other games like them, then Tactics Ogre is definitely worth a try. It'll keep you busy for a while, especially if you decide to dive into all of the content here.
Final stats.
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Front Mission Evolved
I got Dad Titanfall 2 for Father's Day, and the mech combat inspired me to look at something I've owned for years and something else he finished years ago--Front Mission Evolved. It took me about seven and a half hours to get to the end on Normal and I in no way got close to 100% completion. I used an Xbox 360 controller but I did at least try keyboard and mouse a little bit. There's Multiplayer but I didn't touch it at all.
Front Mission as a series is typically a strategy RPG akin to Final Fantasy Tactics or Fire Emblem. You have a number of pilots on your roster and they all have their own Wanzer, a giant humanoid battle robot they drive and fight with. A big draw is being able to customize not only the weapons the Wanzers use, but also the parts that make up their bodies, sometimes giving them different abilities. This game is not a typical Front Mission, instead it has more in common with Front Mission Gun Hazard (SNES game), where you control one person in a third-person shooter environment with some on-foot sections, though this is all in 3D.
Dylan Ramsey is just a typical Wanzer engineer. During a performance test of a prototype Wanzer, he learns of an attack by an unknown group of Wanzer pilots in the city around where his father works, so he rushes off in the prototype to go save him. From there, things get worse and Dylan ends up in the middle of a war. Good thing he's a natural despite no military training. And there's an ace-in-the-hole system he can use if things get too tough...
I, um, may have tried to color my Wanzer in the ‘blue body, white limbs, red toes’ Gundam style.
I actually had a little bit of trouble with the controls at first. I guess it's been a while since I've done a third-person shooter and I couldn't remember if I had inverted Y-axis or not. I'm used to holding the controller with the index fingers on the triggers and I'd bring them up when necessary, but I needed to change to middle fingers on triggers and indexes on shoulders due to how the game works its weapons. Your Wanzer has four weapon slots, one in each hand and one on each shoulder, and each of those four buttons is tied to those slots. The initial setup of a missile launcher on the left shoulder and a gun on the right trigger is fine, but you might need some coordination to use all four. Of course, the game has a weight limit vs power output system, so you won't have all four filled unless you use weaker yet lighter gear.
There are quite a few different parts and weapons to equip and naturally you unlock more the further through the campaign you get. One thing I found neat was that instead of having a typical RPG "buy part, sell part for reduced value" system, you keep the full value of the things you buy no matter how long you use them. When you buy a new part or weapon, you merely pay the difference (or are refunded it) between the old and new with zero loss. That said, I found myself low on funds especially during the last act of the game. You're given the option to replay any mission you've cleared previously, but I didn't go back and grind out money. Probably should have. You especially want a strong torso part since if that runs out of health, you're dead, but you still want strong arms and legs since those getting destroyed greatly screws your accuracy and movement speed respectively. But then you need strong weapons to deal with enemies, so where do you balance the budget? There are little money pickups in each map as well as mini-achievements for each mission that award cash when completed, but I didn't really try for those.
I had “Weapon Pack 1″ DLC installed already, as it must’ve come packaged from when I bought the game. They’re pretty nice weapons apart from their weight, if only because they cost either nothing or $100 to use, and they’re competitive with much costlier weapons. I honestly made use of these to offset my deficit, but I wouldn’t recommend shelling out real money to get around not having enough game cash.
Another neat thing I found was that if you die, you can go back to the Hangar and refit your Wanzer, and the game will put you back to the last checkpoint instead of having you restart the mission. If you're having trouble with one segment, maybe you just need to swap gear around to get through. I know I made use of this feature quite a bit near the end.
With the below gripe, this is the only time in the game where the changes are actually forced on you instead of the game saying you need X.
One gripe I had regarding the customization is that some missions require the use of specific gear. You need a long-range weapon for this one, you need this type of legs for this other one. It kinda gets in the way if you have a certain playstyle, though in a couple of cases, the requirements seem just arbitrary. I'm pretty sure you can't use quad/hover legs in the last mission because of the prerendered cutscenes and they didn't want to have a continuity error.
There are Battle Skills for each weapon type, and each weapon has a number of slots you can equip to them. Each skill has a percentage chance to activate when you use the weapon, and then it lasts for a set amount of seconds. Effects range from simply more damage to damage over time, to stunning the enemy or weapon-specific effects like homing missiles locking on quicker and shields taking zero damage. Remember to set your Battle Skills every time you change weapons since even changing weapons within the same type resets them!
While you sometimes have allies on the field, you don't really need to worry about them and it didn't seem like there was friendly fire...at least on your part to them. I'm pretty sure I got tagged by a friendly but I don't remember if it did damage or just did the stun animation instead. One of the parts you can equip lets you heal allies in return for all of your energy, but I don't think it was necessary at all, though having an on-demand heal is extremely useful, even taking into account the torso having regenerating health on its own. Maybe it works better in Multiplayer? Enemy Wanzers can have the same gear so you should probably kill the Engineers first.
Squishy meaty foot soldier VS giant metal killing mecha goes about as well as you’d expect. At least they can’t step on you like you can when you’re driving...as far as I know.
I honestly had quite a bit of trouble in terms of difficulty. Brawler Wanzers are extremely dangerous, partly because they abuse the "use melee while skating to inflict extra damage" feature, but also because they only hit your torso. And uh, also because they force you into a hit animation if they connect. Maybe kill the Brawlers before Engineers. A couple of the boss battles were troublesome too, mostly because they have really damaging weapons. Most telling was the penultimate battle where I had to retry at least 20 times. Even with the best torso part, either his missiles completely shredded me (dash under him to avoid) or his sword attack got me (back evade but watch for his fake-outs). And then the second phase with the EMP traps as well as the scattered ones... I really should have done some grinding, I guess. The actual final boss tripped me up a couple of times but it was a matter of avoiding his big attack and then unloading when he was open, and the second phase wasn't bad at all. I wound up actually using all four weapon slots for that one, and while they were weaker weapons, I think the alpha strike method worked out okay.
Four versus one just doesn’t seem fair to them, honestly.
I'm pretty sure I died at least once in every on-foot section. The controls are pretty similar, though you have just two weapons you carry with one in use at all times, you can't jump and instead do a combat roll, and instead of worrying about the health of individual parts, you just have a basic health bar that regenerates when you're not hurt after so many seconds. And you actually need to reload your gun. You have zero pilot upgrades so each section is pretty much the same in terms of how you'd expect to perform, other than enemy density and positioning. There are no timed sections there and your allies are still invulnerable, so you can probably do a better job than I did if you just take your time and stay in cover to heal up.
There are three sections where you're being airlifted to another area and you have to fire at the enemy using the ship's guns attached to your Wanzer. It's basically an auto-scrolling level but your guns and missiles have infinite ammo, just you have to mind their overheating. Those aren't bad, but you don't have a very wide angle of attack so something slipping by and getting under the helicopter can potentially hurt you a bit.
I almost wonder how much of the military’s money I wasted just by holding down all four fire buttons. Maybe that’s why I was broke all game?
The controls otherwise did fine for me, though I had some trouble setting up the keyboard and mouse controls mostly because of how many functions you need to set up, and I tried to make it as close to how I have Warframe's controls set, though that didn't work out too well. I also got so used to needing the Agility backpack to skate using B that I completely missed that you can skate without it by pressing L3. Remember to read the manual and controls!
I don't really have anything to say about the music, other than I didn't really notice it most of the game. The voicework was all right, but I noticed that some cutscenes had drastically lower volume for the voices than the rest of the game, and that kinda threw me off. A couple of the voiced lines during the missions seemed to get cut off immediately by another character but that didn't seem to break the game any the two times it happened.
The quirky miniboss squad would be right at home in a Metal Gear game. The twist: Kojima Productions actually is in the credits...
Each mission has 20 sensors to find and destroy, as well as three emblems to discover, as well as the mini-achievements specific to those missions. 100%ing the game would take some time, especially if you don't have a guide to hunt down the sensors, but the game is otherwise pretty short. No extra endings, no New Game Plus, though you can always play early missions with your late-game gear and steamroll the enemy. You don’t seem to unlock anything for beating the game, either. I think I got about all the enjoyment I could out of this, though.
It's not turn-based or grid-based, but Front Mission Evolved still isn't too bad of a third-person shooter with giant robots and secret government weapons. Someone who's really followed the series might get more out of it despite the gameplay departure, given some of the locations and the factions involved, but even someone new to the series could get into this. It ran well enough on my aging computer, but given it's a game from 2010... There are probably better games on the market, but I had interest in the series and I don't regret this purchase, even if it’s years down the road.
Zombie Wanzers. I’m pretty sure this isn’t a Metal Gear game.
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Kingdom Hearts II
It took me about 35 hours to get to the end this time around. I didn't 100% the game by any means. This was also the first game to give me some slowdown in PCSX2, though it's the second game overall I've played there so that's not saying much. In terms of difficulty, this was pretty easy, much easier than what I remember of the first KH and especially Re: Chain of Memories. I think I game overed twice the entire time, losing to Demyx getting serious and Xemnas' final phase once each. I picked the Dream Shield and had Valor Form the highest ranked, though I stopped using Forms during the last part of the game.
Roxas is your typical teenager in the typical Twilight Town...apart from mysteries like something being stolen so well that the words go missing too, or reality just stopping on its own every so often. Not to mention that Roxas summons the Keyblade...and he looks awfully a lot like Sora. It's probably not anything important. Don't worry, Roxas gets his own game and we'll be reunited with Sora soon enough.
Lucky number.
I guess I forgot to mention with the last two reviews that I didn't grow up Disney, so apart from doing my own research, I don't really have any familiarity with the Disney stories and all. So there's no real pull for that nostalgia I guess. I like Kingdom Hearts because it's a fun action RPG and at least I know the Final Fantasy characters here.
It's been a few years since I last played the first Kingdom Hearts, so I might have a couple of details wrong. Sorry!
“I don’t feel so good...” There, meme complete.
True to a sequel, there's a bunch of new here. Only a couple of worlds from the first (two) game(s) returns, and the ones that do are expanded or changed. Like Hollow Bastion now being the town world like Traverse Town was, or Atlantica becoming a minigame world like 100 Acre Wood. New Keyblades, new allies, new magic, new summons, new systems too.
One big thing added is the Reaction command, where during combat (or even going up to somebody or a chest) gives you a context-sensitive prompt above the Commands menu with a Triangle button prompt. Open a chest, Talk to people, avoid damage or turn attacks around with it--you'll be using it a bunch so keep an eye out for when it shows up. Most battles can be finished without using them, but they're worth using. And of course some battles require their use too.
No thanks.
A new Drive system lets Sora borrow the powers of his allies (removing them from combat) to power himself up in a new Form, such as Goofy enabling Valor Form to fight with two Keyblades while locking Sora out of magic use, or Wisdom Form taking Donald's power to give Sora a ranged attack and powered-up magic. You only start with Valor but you unlock two more during the course of the game with a fourth being an 11th hour superpower if you can get it to show up. And a fifth dud form that has a chance of showing up anytime you Drive in battle, especially against the antagonists this time around. One cool thing about this feature is that if you trigger a cutscene while in a Drive Form, Sora's clothes will still be changed during it.
The allies you absorb for your Forms return during cutscenes too. Don’t think about it too much.
You no longer are given mobility abilities during the game. When you level Drive Forms, regular Sora gets weaker versions of the movement abilities the Drive Form uses, so Valor grants High Jump, Wisdom grants Air Slide, Final grants Glide, and so on. I didn't see if there were any chests that required High Jump or so on, but the rest of the game doesn't really need them. They're still nice for evading attacks at least.
Magic still uses an MP bar, but you now enter MP Charge when it empties, where you get a full bar back after so many seconds instead of needing to hit enemies to slowly charge it up from zero. You also have a higher Drive charge rate while waiting and entering a Drive Form fully restores HP and MP both. Fire was changed from a spammable homing projectile to a quick blaze around Sora, and Cure now takes all of your MP, if it's 100 or 10 and still has the same effect. Reflect can work as a stand-in for Block and creates a damaging field around Sora if an enemy hits the barrier, and Magnet can pull enemies to a point in the air for you to smack while they're helpless. The three Forms that can use magic also change up the spells a little, such as increasing the area of effect or making them work differently altogether. I didn't have many MP Hastes so I still had to wait a little while to get my MP back, and depending on the fight, I'd need to use Cure to keep everyone alive and I'd be right back where I was. A system where it'd slowly regenerate on its own would've worked better for me, but I think it's a step up from KH1's system...though I liked how many casts of Fire you could get on a full bar back then.
Limits give new meaning to the term “teamwork”.
Each ally also has a Limit that teams Sora and that ally up for special attacks that might replace his Attack command and adds their own Reaction commands too, as well as big finishers. Limits are timed and automatically end when you unleash the finisher, or they can be canceled manually. Limits eat up your entire MP bar but they can be worth it if you get a bunch of hits in. Summons work differently here too, where you now sacrifice some Drive bars and your two allies to bring the Summon onto the field. They have a number of functions but they too have their own Limit that cuts down how long they can stay out.
Gummi Ship segments return but this too has been expanded. Now the screen will turn to face enemies coming from the sides or behind, and you can eventually unlock the use of two 'Teeny Ships' that can block enemy shots and have their own armaments too. Collect medals from destroyed enemies to increase your Medal Rank and allow better Treasures to drop, and max out the Medal Rank to send your ship into a Berserk fury until you get damaged! Ships can equip Abilities too like slowly regenerating health or pulling in nearby medal drops, to letting you take just one Teeny Ship but get the second one's maximum cost added to the primary ship's, expanding how many Gummi Blocks you can stack up there. I honestly really liked the Gummi Ship segments and the ship I built and stuck with most of the game mostly had a bunch of guns stuck on it. None of the rewards for the mode carries over to the on-foot segments, but that didn't really impact my opinion of it much.
It’s kinda hard to see the screen with Berserk up, but you tear everything apart very quickly regardless.
You fight Organization XIII this time around, a group of beings that shouldn't exist on a quest to reclaim their hearts. Though they're unnatural abominations, they strangely look human. They work with the Disney villains this time around, though Maleficient has her own plans counter to theirs. She's not on your side, though. She just wants a fancy castle to call home after you evicted her from Hollow Bastion in the first game. Jerk.
Music's still good. There are quite a few new themes though worlds we've been to before have rearranged music. I really liked the boss theme when fighting the Disney villains ("Encounter" I think?), but there really wasn't any music that I didn't like at all. "Under the Sea" still exists as part of Atlantica's musical, but Atlantica's field theme is pretty nice this time around. It's almost a shame you're not there for very long since there's zero combat this time around.
Atlantica is a rhythm minigame world this time. I hope you like singing. Also, don’t pause during any of the songs or you’ll have to start over!
I don't have any complaints about the controls. I heard that the game was criticized for being button-mashy and I think it kinda is, especially given the ease that you get combo extenders. There is at least one boss fight where you actually do have to mash the Triangle button to do damage. I hope your controller has strong enough buttons! You don't have Dodge Roll anymore (but Limit Form in Final Mix does), so you instead have equippable ability Guard as your defense, and you can use Wisdom Form's Quick Run/Air Slide to move quickly once you unlock it. Each Form has their own combo animations and areas of effect and these of course change in the air, and you can also equip regular Sora with different combo finishers.
Favorite world? Timeless River of all things. I liked the character designs but I really liked a nice touch done with the voice clips and sound effects--they're given a low-fidelity pass to make them sound like they're coming out of the speakers on an old TV! Least favorite world? Port Royal. I didn't mind the realistically-rendered characters making the adventuring trio look out of place, but the world's gimmick is when fighting Barbossa's undead pirates, you can only damage them when they're in the moonlight and of course there are shaded areas to give them cover. Your allies won't let up attacking them no matter what and it just made battles drag on forever.
It’s so silly but it just slightly beats out Space Paranoids for me.
Maybe.
The only real complaints I had with the game were that it seemed like too often you were forced to use the world's ally in your party and there were a number of fights where you're forced to fight alone, so you lose access to both Drive Forms and Summons. I kinda didn't like how much effort was required to level the Drive Forms too. Valor Form at least seems the most natural because you just have to hit things, but the others take quite a bit of effort to level up, either through killing enemies or picking up Drive Orbs. Maybe that's the price of power, but for me looking forward to Wisdom Form, it sure didn't measure up. I didn't get Master and Final Forms raised too much. I even used cheat codes for infinite drive meter once I finished the game, but I didn't really feel like putting in all that work.
And, I guess the three hour introduction sequence with Roxas kinda dragged on a little too long. I understand they were trying to make the player care for Roxas given what happens to him, but not very much happens for most of the days. I dunno, I imagine people might want to know where the hell Sora, Donald, and Goofy are and why you're playing this copycat at some point.
Too bad this fight isn’t playable in the original version.
That aside, don't be put off of the game with that sequence like I was the first time around. It's only a little under ten percent of the entire game! And the rest of it is a lot better too! I liked it more than Chain of Memories all right, and there's a pretty meaty adventure here. I dunno if it'd be a good jumping-on point for people new to the series, though you'd likely be buying one of the PS3/PS4 HD ReMIXes that has the first game and Re:CoM with it, so you really should start with the prior games. But yes, overall, I really did enjoy my time and I managed to take like 800 screenshots so I'd better go pare those down...
Final stats.
...now I just need to get Dream Drop Distance and watch a Let’s Play of 0.8 A Fragmentary Passage, then I’ll be ready to watch another LP of KH3.
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Tell Me Everything
I received Tell Me Everything through the Steam Curator Connect program. I'll preface this by saying that these kinds of games aren't really my cup of tea so that's where most of the Not Recommended/Informational comes into play. I threw myself at The Porcelain Paradox variation A for about three hours before calling it quits.
There's been a murder and you have been called in as the detective to uncover the murderer. You're given a few scant details like the identity of the victim and the manner of death, but you're also told that one of the three suspects you're to interview is absolutely the killer--but which one?
Unfortunately, you can’t just arrest everybody. You can accuse the constable of murder too! But you can’t arrest him...
While I haven't played them, Tell Me Everything reminds me of old interaction fiction games that had text parsers for your controls, though here you're given an array of words to build sentences with as opposed to a blank text box. I guess part of it does boil down to figuring out how to say what you want within the confines of what words you have, but by bringing up topics with the suspects, you can unlock additional terms and then use those terms to unlock further ones. The goal of the game is to identify the actual murderer, but only through what you learn by talking to the suspects. When you've identified the killer, talk to the fourth character, the Police Constable, and have the suspect arrested. Of course, you can arrest any of the three at any time but you're guaranteed to fail if you don't have a solid case.
These pictures in sequence show how the array changes when you select words. Some of the arrays are smaller and don’t change, though.
All four characters have four meters that slowly build up the more you talk to them, and apparently what they say becomes unreliable when they're worked up. I didn't try to intentionally agitate anybody to get different answers out of them. You can talk to another person and whoever you've riled up will cool off. I didn't see if certain topics raised certain meters or if it was entirely random, though.
ANGER MAX (not really)
There are also some humorous responses you can give to people. Even from the get-go, you can tell the constable "banana" instead of okay and he'll respond to it, or you can ask the doctor "how many apples a day to keep you away" and you get a response for that too. Two of the achievements I got were related to reactions I got for comments not related to the murder and I imagine there are more like that. This might ruin the serious atmosphere the game sets up, but then you're the one controlling what the detective says. Characters will comment if you say something that's not a good enough sentence though they quickly go through canned phrases. I didn't seem to notice a tolerance meter hit for screwing up or misclicking at least.
He has a response for “ay caramba” too!
There were only a few actual issues with the game, like spelling or spacing errors, a color tag was put into text by accident, and a weird quirk where the 3D models in the background warp if they completely turn one direction. I'm not sure if having hints on and having no highlight even if there's an actual valid sentence you can form is a bug or not, but then I guess it might not be designed to do all of the work for you.
As for my gripes, I had trouble with the word puzzle system mostly because I couldn't easily transfer what I picked up on to my character. It's sort of like with Ace Attorney, where you the player might realize a character is lying, but you have to have your character press certain statements to get them to learn this. Here, you have three (or four with the constable) characters to use all of your words on and I felt like I was just throwing random sentences at people to see what I got versus really having a plan. And any ideas I had were shot down by not having the words available, and I didn't know if they would later unlock or would never show up. Then again, I fully admit to save-scumming in the first Ace Attorney, so again, these games aren't for me.
Now my Frustration meter is rising.
The music was a little repetitive, and it didn't help that every time I alt-tabbed out to check something out of the game, it'd restart.
I didn't like how there was no easy way to reset a sentence apart from moving to talk to someone else. If you got far in a chain and the word you were hoping for wasn't there, you'd either have to click each word backwards in sequence or switch suspects.
Escape instantly exits to the main menu and while it seemed like you could keep going with the current case with the Start a New Case option, there didn't seem to be an actual save system yet.
I didn't enjoy my time with it, but I can respect what it was going for. If you're into writing down details in the real world to help you with a game or if you like the idea of trying to solve a crime using a pretty unique sentence-building system, then you'd probably like this game. There's some entertainment value in seeing all of the responses you can get out of people too, funny or not. It's pretty light on content now, having (at the time of this writing) just two variations of one case, but the dev has promised five total cases with three variations each, and there's a good framework here. It'll probably end up being a pretty neat game when all the content's there and there's been some polish put down. Just right now, it's a little rough.
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Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories (Riku)
I honestly wasn't looking forward to trying this half of the game given how the first half went. I knew that there were some differences between the two modes so I dipped my toes in the water so to speak and kinda got into it. And then completely misread how one feature worked and started to dislike it, only to figure out how it worked and THEN everything clicked and I ended up actually enjoying it. It took me just under eight hours to get to the end of Reverse/Rebirth.
Riku wakes up floating in a grey void and is told that he can sleep in darkness forever or wake up and face the light and the pain to come with it. Naturally, he figures that floating is boring and takes the first steps into Castle Oblivion's deepest basement, arriving there somehow sometime after helping King Mickey and Sora close the Door to Darkness. Much like in Sora's story, it's all uphill from here...
Take that, Darkboy.
Riku's section of the game isn't a New Game Plus given that nothing in Sora's story transfers across, other than enabling you to play through Reverse/Rebirth. While Riku still is bound to the card-based combat of Castle Oblivion, there are a few differences that make his part of the game different from Sora's.
The first thing is that Riku can't change his deck...at all. You can't even change the order of cards. His deck is set for every world, so some worlds will give you a bunch of cards, some will give you several high-value cards, some will give you a paltry selection of weak cards...so you really should check the deck list out whenever you create a new world to see what you'll be dealing with. The halls of the castle between the floors seem to have their own deck, but you get ambushed a few times leaving a world so you don't have an opportunity to check your cards before getting thrown into battle.
Riku only has attack cards, barring the one Hi-Potion for the 'hallway' deck. All of the cards are the same Soul Eater too, so no needing to worry about strike/thrust/combo finish stats. This also means he doesn't get to use summons or magic, and thus he can't heal himself in-battle. King Mickey joins you early on and he's a great card if you can play him--he not only heals you a little, he stuns/damages enemies in a large area and he also reloads your cards! Because of Riku's sealed deck, breaking things in the environment only gives you HP balls so this is the only other way to heal outside of save points.
Take a drink anytime smell or scent is brought up. Have fun!
Instead of needing to manage level-up rewards between HP, expanding deck capacity, and learning new Sleights, Riku instead increases health, increases the Attack Power of his cards, and extends how long he can maintain Dark Mode. I could actually tell that the AP bonuses did something given I could keep killing Heartless even on later floors in a few hits, barring the final two where they get a massive jump in durability as in Sora's game. Dark Mode is unlocked early and is triggered when you break enemy cards. The bigger the difference between the cards, the more points given. Get 30 total and Riku transforms, refills his deck, and enters a super mode where his attacks are faster and hit harder (and several change entirely) as well as enabling the use of Sleights, though you still lose cards in the exchange. Riku can be knocked out of it by having his cards broken or taking damage. The card that triggers Dark Mode won't fire, so be careful playing King Mickey cards if you're about to die!
There's also a 'Rapid Break' system where you get double the points if you break an enemy's card within a very tiny timeframe that it's played. It's not something you can really take advantage of apart from keeping a high-value card ready to play and playing it as soon as you see the other card come out, but it's a big help to getting your berserk on.
There's a new mechanic in Duels too. Play a card that matches the value that an enemy plays and you're given a triangle reaction prompt. You're given a short minigame where the enemy will play three/five/seven cards and you're given four/six/eight seconds to break every one. Succeed and you trigger a strong attack; fail and Riku gets stunned for several seconds. This was the thing I tripped on because I thought you had to match every card instead of just break them. Duels don't even cost you cards the way Sleights do!
The red portion of his lifebar is the damage this single Duel is inflicting. I am shredding him!
Riku has the reload card, but it requires zero charge time and doesn't require more time to work the more you use it in battle, though you still have to wait for the card return animation to finish before you can do anything. A strategy I used was to trigger a Duel, mash cross to literally throw my deck at my opponent, and then reload immediately to repeat the cycle of hurting. You're not penalized for 'wasting' cards failing to break the enemy's in a Duel so maybe this was expected behavior?
Riku silently gets one grey enemy card added to his deck for the duration of a world, such as Defender in Hollow Bastion, but you can't keep those for other worlds. Instead, you get to keep boss cards and can keep all of them in your deck at once. Were there powerful effects you wanted to use in Sora's story but couldn't fit them in? Not a problem here! I got a lot of use out of the Dragon Maleficent card considering its downside (slower reload times) doesn't even apply to Riku...and it's the very first boss card you get even.
While there were several gameplay improvements to me, the story is lacking. Riku still needs to traverse the Disney worlds and all, but almost all of them are devoid of any plot content. Riku creates a world, is given the Key to Beginnings, and slaughters his way to that door and destroys the boss hiding behind it. Most of the story stuff happens between the halls, focused on Riku's struggle to resist the power of darkness and the machinations of the Organization, including some new faces unique to this side of the story and expanding scenes we saw earlier through Sora's run. His worlds are really short too. Sora had to roam around the worlds to open the Beginnings->Guidance->Truth doors while here, there are only a handful of rooms. You still use map cards but ones irrelevant to this mode like Moogle Room and Alchemic Waking don't drop.
This is one world...
...and this is the final. Four whole rooms!
I think that about covers the differences. There are a few!
I really did enjoy this mode. I'm usually a sucker for customization but the fixed deck just worked for me somehow. I didn't need to hunt down Moogle Points to buy better cards or sit through sequences that largely were the same from KH1, and the card combat flowed better for me. I guess it's because they 'hand crafted' enemy decks as well as your own, so I didn't have to struggle nearly as hard as with Sora. That and on top of the AP bonuses you could take, the three-card Duel had a big ground-based area of effect if you triggered it, making random battles pretty easy. With Sora, deleting groups of enemies relied on Sleights and if I ran dry on cards before they were all gone, I was screwed. Dark Mode Riku even gets the dash-spam move from KH1 when you fought him as a boss here as a Sleight, but I always went with Duels because they were so strong for basically zero cost. All it took was being able to page through the deck to get the right card before the enemy's disappeared off-screen.
There's no downside to using Dark Mode either, not even a plot-relevant reason considering Riku's trying not to fall back under darkness' sway. Once you trigger it, you can stay in it for the rest of battle if you're careful and tear shit apart at the same time. Combo it with Duels too!
Though he was a villain, I really liked the “what measure is a non-human?” as well as the “cloning blues” angle they played with Riku Replica. Also sorry, TVTropes links. Poor guy was pretty tragic.
Sora's difficulty gradually grew until it spiked during Twilight Town and Castle Oblivion proper's floors, with the bosses there giving me the most trouble. I really only had trouble with the Vexen fight because I didn't understand how Duels worked and he had a bunch of health for that point in the game too. Trickmaster in Wonderland killed me once too because your deck is terrible, and the final Riku Replica fight got me, though I figured out using the Jafar card at the start (enemies can't break your cards no matter what value you play) and whittling him down early was a great strategy. Oh, and Guard Armor killed me a few times because I tried to use regular Dark Mode Sleights on it and burned all of my cards. I honestly didn't really have trouble with anything else in the game. I took AP whenever it was available and I think I had a total of 22 DP at the end, with the rest going into HP and that was largely unnecessary. And this was in a mode where the only in-battle heal was based on a random drop, could be broken, and a card I didn't throw into a stocked combo because I wanted my cards more.
It helped that Duels never got old.
So yeah, I actually had fun with this. I won't say it redeems the entirety of Sora's story for me, but I'm actually really glad I decided to give this a try instead of trashing the rest. Color me impressed.
Final stats.
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Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories (Sora)
Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories is a remake of the GBA game, originally included as part of Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix. We never got Final Mix until the HD remakes, but Square-Enix still put out this remake near the end of 2008 all the same. I got near the end several years ago when I first played it and I came close to quitting again almost in the same spot. It took me almost 20 hours to get to the end of Sora's story on Standard Mode.
Also, this is my first foray into PS2 emulation, and I'm actually really impressed at how well PCSX2 ran the game on my system. All these years thinking I didn't have a strong enough rig for it and the only problems I had were minor (Sora T-posing before some boss battles, the menu background glitching out if I paused emulation for a moment).
Not long after closing the door to Kingdom Hearts on both sides in the first game, Sora continues to travel with Goofy and Donald in search of King Mickey and Riku. One night, Sora is accosted by a man in a black coat and follows him to Castle Oblivion, a mysterious place where "to lose is to find" and the trio find that they're slowly losing their abilities and memories...but what will they gain in the exchange? The appearance of each floor of the castle is tied to a world that Sora visited on his first journey, so things will be familiar at first glance.
But he won't be familiar to the people you'd remember.
Re: Chain of Memories tries to combine the action RPG gameplay of the Kingdom Hearts series with some aspects of the card game War, of all things. Everything in this game is controlled by cards, be it attacking, using spells or items, having friends help you, and even to traverse Castle Oblivion's many floors. While the effects of the cards are important, the most important part is the number. Enemies play cards too and you need to play a higher-number card to break their card and have your attack or spell succeed--and if the enemy outplays you, you stagger. 2 beats 1, 5 beats 2, and so on, but 0 is a special card that breaks anything...but also is broken by anything else, the ultimate glass cannon.
What I found interesting was that you could use cards defensively too. If an enemy cast a Fire spell at you, you could cancel it out any time their card was still on-screen, so there was a little bit of strategy involved as opposed to spamming attacks forever, though that was effective too. Even bosses weren't exempt to these rules so you could stop big attacks just by playing the right cards. Each card costs an increasing number of Card/Capacity Points the higher its number, with 0 costing the most. Though you could gain an extra 25CP per level up, you also had choices for an extra 15HP, or learning a new Sleight if available.
Here, Donald is shielding me by not allowing enemies to attack unless they can beat the (regrettably hidden) value on his card. It works both ways so don't burn cards if you can't top what the enemy's played!
Sleights are formed when you stock three cards together that fit certain criteria, such as being between X and Y values or being three of the same type or different types of cards. Most of these are special attacks Sora had in the first game such as Strike Raid or Sonic Blade, while others are powered-up Summons or variants of existing moves like Blizzard Raid, or even new moves like Warpinator. Well, I haven't gotten to KH2 yet so I dunno what ones were 'leaked backwards' to ReCoM. While Sleights are powerful, they also have a catch--the first card used in the combo is destroyed for the rest of the fight. When you run out of cards normally, you can use the Reload card to slowly fill a gauge and you refresh your hand--not so with these first cards barring item cards like Hi-Potion or Mega-Ether. It's power at a price and it might be too costly in the long drawn-out battles later in the game.
Tactical nuke, coming up. I also got very few pictures of actual combat since I still need to train myself to be able to hit a hotkey on my keyboard while both hands are occupied with a controller.
New cards are randomly gained by interacting with structures in each of the rooms, either by smacking them with the Keyblade or jumping on them or whatever, though you also get HP orbs to spawn or Moogle Point balls instead. The attack cards that drop are tied to the world that gave them in the first game such as Agrabah giving Three Wishes and Atlantica giving Crabclaw, though magic and item cards drop too. Moogle Points are used to buy card packs from Moogle Rooms you create, and you always get five free attack cards when you first visit. You can sell unwanted cards for more Moogle Points to then buy more cards. Enemies can drop Enemy Cards that grant limited effects like Pirate setting all of your card values to zero until you reload your hand once, and Bosses grant their card when you defeat them (for the final time in the case of rematches) such as Jafar making it impossible to have your cards be broken for 20 attacks.
Enemies don't otherwise drop attack or magic or item cards, unfortunately. They instead drop Map Cards after battle, and these are used to move through each floor. They come in red, green, and blue varieties and these too have numbers tied to them. Every room has at least one exit and to open the door, you need to use a Map Card that fits the requirement, such as "over X value or 0" or "any blue card" or "sacrifice cards to total Y value". Each card has a zero to three star rating each for how big the room is as well as how many Heartless are present inside. Calm Bounty for example never has any Heartless in it (given it's a save room) while Teeming Darkness is a three-star room with three-star Heartless. Enemies defeated in rooms stay dead but it's possible to remake a room by going to an open door and hitting Triangle to get the prompt again. You could for example make a Moogle Room, get the free five cards and leave, then turn around and make another Moogle Room and get another set of freebies, provided you have enough cards that fit the criteria. You can hold only 99 Map Cards at one time and you can only discard to get more as opposed to selling them.
Provided you have enough cards of the right kind, you can technically grind forever in rooms...or just make paths of Heartless-exempt rooms to speed through a world. I did this with the 13th floor, actually.
There is a fourth color, gold, which is tied to story events. A "Key to Rewards" card starts dropping around the seventh floor, which opens a door that holds special treasure too. Special doors will have the same criteria to open like regular doors, but you also have to sacrifice the gold card to open it. Be careful since the Key to Truth isn't the only one to have boss battles behind it sometimes!
There are World Cards too and those are given in two sets so you can pick the order you tackle them, though assigning any world to a floor is permanent unlike Map Card assignments. The events within the worlds is largely a retelling of their KH1 plot though most of the important stuff that happens is between the floors and the scenes involving the antagonists controlling the castle. You fight old bosses but the card system gives them a little bit of a twist, but the new enemies can prove tricky since they get Sleights too on top of being able to see their cards as they shuffle through their deck.
I didn't get any pictures of bosses having visible cards, so instead have this picture of Pooh after getting run over by a runaway rolling pumpkin. 100 Acre Wood has a few minigames to break up the card combat.
The music is mostly the same as in KH1 though Destiny Islands getting a piano arrangement was nice. There are only two new worlds but quite a few new characters, so if you're playing the games by release order (at least, original release order), you have to wade through quite a bit of old content to get at the new.
The biggest problem I had with the game is that battles take a really long time to get through, at least in comparison to what I remember of KH1. Each Heartless in the field is really several, and there are usually two 'waves' of enemies. Beat up the first one and the second set spawns in, usually with different flavors to keep things interesting. Enemy durability also gets pretty ridiculous the further through the game you get, and I guess it was my failing to not order my attack cards in repeating patterns of "strong strike", "strong thrust", "strong combo finish" to go with the three-hit combo you have. Sora never actually gets stronger but gets stronger cards, but that didn't translate into better dispatch times. Stronger cards of course cost more to deck so I either had a lot of low-damage cards or stronger ones with progressively longer reload times.
Battles just got sloggier the higher up I went, and because Donald and Goofy are now summons in a way, you're the only one doing all of the work and you can't play other cards while their effect is going off. Donald deserves mention too since he randomly casts two of Fire, Blizzard, Thunder, and Cure. It doesn't matter if the enemy absorbs Fire or if you're at full HP, the RNG controls his behavior and can make him a liability. Donald and Goofy (and other friends if available) cards drop into the field at random so you may have to hold out for a while to get some extra help, but at least their cards can never be depleted since they're not actually a part of your deck.
They were transformed into cards but are just fine out of combat...despite the fact they'd be much more useful this way.
I also kinda screwed up by making a bunch of my cards Premium. Premium Cards cost the same as a 1-value card of that type regardless of its actual value, but the kicker is that it won't come back when you do a regular reload. I used a bunch of item cards in my deck but once I ran out of those, I was boned pretty badly. There's a strategy in having a secondary deck of cards just to convert in a Premium Room to sell. Somewhat necessary because...
I found it difficult to get Moogle Points naturally. I read that in the GBA version, Moogle Points scale with the floor level so breaking stuff stayed rewarding, but the orb values never change no matter what here. I had to grind them out a few times in Agrabah since Aladdin's card causes enemies to drop MP on every attack he lands, but since Friend Cards randomly spawn in even when in a Meeting Ground room, this got to be pretty tedious. I did end up selling cards at the very end to fund my gimmick deck since I got frustrated trying to fight the penultimate boss the proper way but I still didn't end up with too many surplus MP at the end. Having to leave and lose the world's progress to grind sucked too. Since you could consider Moogle Points as being the counterpart to Munny in the other games, not having enemies drop it nor being able to sell the Map Cards you easily hit the max on came off as awkward. Having unlimited Moogle Points wouldn't win you the game since you still needed CP to deck in the right cards, assuming you lucked out on the random card draws too.
Moogles will offer better card packs the higher up you go too, though they come at a higher cost of course.
The first fight with Marluxia is almost where I called it quits. I already wasn't having fun and having a wall like that just soured me even more on the experience. Not only did his attacks hit really hard, he helpfully teleported out of range of Sonic Blade and he could just completely ignore hitstun to teleport away in the middle of a regular combo. Fucking cheap! My strategy was inspired by something I read in a walkthrough for the GBA version--use only zero cards and just break everything he throws at you. It did work (though I still resorted to savestates because I wanted this shit over with) but then it took forever because I couldn't guarantee all three hits in a combo would land and I still needed to save cards to break his Sleights. His second and third forms (the latter of which is new to the remake) weren't anywhere near as difficult but then they still took forever to die.
And it seemed at the end of my Sleights and some other attacks, I would lose Lock-On for no reason. Even if the target was still alive.
So yeah. The whole thing about enemies taking a while to die was really my biggest sticking point. It was kinda nice to completely negate enemy attacks but then you didn't have the 'safety' of always having the Keyblade to swing around when you were out of MP or waiting for your Commands to recharge. Leveling up didn't seem to confer all that much power per level because your damage was tied to your cards and all level did was make you more durable or let you deck in more cards at once.
It's worth making a Bottomless Heartless room once just to see everything (or not) this way. It even carries over into battles!
I imagine seeing the old worlds was a bit more...what's the word, interesting? on the GBA since you had the fixed isometric angle and nothing but spritework as opposed to the 3D models here. Quite a lot was made whole-cloth for the handheld version but here, something just feels off even if the rooms draw reference to the actual places in KH1. I guess I had a problem with the asset reuse, but that was kinda unavoidable making the game 3D again. The cutscenes weren't bad but I noticed how blurry they were given how much closer to my TV I was than the last time I played.
I'm trying to be really funny by using this image right after talking about blurriness.
I just didn't really enjoy this. I liked it more during the early part but it tapered off near the end, and it dropped off during the final floor. A repeat of Metal Gear Solid 2, how sad! I can appreciate what they were trying to go for but it might've been a better system in a different game or something. I'm more used to relentlessly assaulting the enemy instead of having to stop after a few attacks for a breather I'm forced to take.
Once you finish Sora's story, you're able to play as Riku and experience his side as he escapes the deepest basement of Castle Oblivion as well as the lingering darkness in his heart. I'll see about covering that one of these days since his mode has quite a few differences from Sora's. Here's hoping I have a better time with it!
Final stats.
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Star Ocean: Second Evolution
Star Ocean: The Second Story is probably my favorite PS1 game. Yeah, it wasn't as popular as the Squaresoft juggernauts on the system but it was something refreshing since at the time, I only knew JRPGs as turn-based/ATB "stand in formation and trade blows with the enemy" ordeals. I rented this one day on a whim (and because the back of the box looked interesting) and I got hooked. I bought it later on and here I am. How long ago was that? Anyway, about a decade ago, Star Ocean and its sequel got remakes for the PSP and I wanted to see how much was changed and improved from the original. Unlike Star Ocean First Departure, it's not a full-on remake but unlike Valkyrie Profile Lenneth, it's not merely a slightly enhanced port.
Uh, anyway, I decided to go through with Rena and it took me a little over 29 hours to get to the end without really trying to 100% the game. I recruited Celine, Ashton, Bowman, Dias, Noel, and Chisato and my team ended up being Claude, Bowman, Chisato, and Noel. I wanted to try characters who I haven't used much for a change. I didn't even enter the post-game dungeon Maze of Tribulations this time. Levels ended up being high 70s and low 80s for the final team too.
Far in the future, a Pangalatic Federation cadet goes on his first real mission with his father, Ronyx Kenni (from the first Star Ocean) taking the lead. An accident with still-active machinery in an otherwise deserted area winds up transporting Claude to the underdeveloped planet Expel, where reckless usage of his phase gun saves Rena Lanford from danger, but sets the plot into motion. There is a legend about a Hero of Light who wears alien raiment and carries a Sword of Light that will save the world from danger...and only a few months ago, this Sorcery Globe crashed onto the continent of Ell, causing monsters and natural disasters to sprout up everywhere.
What is the secret behind this mysterious meteorite?
Star Ocean 2 is pretty neat in that there's a lot of replay value just due to how the characters work. You're given your choice between Claude and Rena to start, but while the plot is the same for both, you of course see some events only that character sees, and there are some characters who will offer to join you only if you're playing as one or the other. And there are some mutally-exclusive characters who won't join if the other's present. There are eight total character slots and you're only required to have Claude and Rena in your party, so the remaining six slots have to be split between eleven other people and some of them require work to recruit. My very first time through, I only had six people total at the end because those were the only ones who the main plot introduced me to.
Hey, I think we passed the auditions for the next Metal Gear game!
The game is still pretty slow starting out, but they have to dump exposition to fill in the backstory due to Claude not knowing the troubles Expel has been having these past few months, so tough it out for the first hour or so and it'll start getting better. Star Ocean 2 works about the same as any other JRPG, in that you have a general plotline and a bunch of towns and monsters to destroy between them. Battles happen in real time--fight woosh and your team appears on one side while the enemy appears on the other, and your characters can run at the enemy and smack them with their weapons, use special attacks, cast spells if available, use items, and so on. When you build up enough speed, it's actually possible to move out of the way of enemy attacks and then close to melee range again. Star Ocean and Second Story were made by some of the people who made Tales of Phantasia, but my first encounter with the Tales series wouldn't be until Symphonia on the Gamecube.
Characters are separated into two classes, fighters and mages. Fighters get access to Special Attacks and you're allowed two active ones per character (and these are tied to the shoulder buttons), while mages can cast any spell you have set the AI to cast, or you can also set two offensive spells to the shoulders which I think is a new feature to Second Evolution. Fighters are generally superior since they move faster, their Special Attacks tend to hit multiple times, and in this version, they have access to a three-hit combo when you control them. Mages have a wide variety of elemental spells and some buffs/debuffs, but apart from their initial spells, magic will stop time while their animation plays. This can be good since if the enemy takes any damage at all, they'll be stunned for a moment which can be the opening your fighters need (to stop a quick enemy or interrupt an enemy spellcaster for example). It can be bad since from a damage per second perspective, it might not be worth the animation time since almost all spells hit only one time and the damage cap is 9999. Second Evolution sped up many spells and the related Combat Skills will always reduce casting time and reduce the cooldown between spells instead of it being a random chance. You're still restricted to four characters on a combat team even if you have more, and if your fighting team dies...so does your reserve, apparently.
Battles are pretty much a flat plane with zero features. The original SO2 had mine carts roll through battles in a single area that could harm whoever made contact but those are gone. The switches in the Field of Might are still there. Also, Earth spells seem to hit flying targets now?
While you can find and buy gear and a big variety of items like in any RPG, Star Ocean lets you create new things from different materials. You're given Skill Points on every level up and you can put those into various Skills, which may increase your stats and Skills combine to make Specialties and Item Creation abilities. For example, Knife increases the character's Strength by 10 points for every level, Keen Eye increases the HP or MP restored by cooked foods, and Recipe makes the character's favorite food heal more. These three Skills together form the Cooking Item Creation ability, where you turn a raw food material into a meal (or fail trying). You don't start with access to every skill from the onset, instead you need to visit the Skill Guilds in every town to buy packs of them, such as Knowledge 2 or Combat 3, to unlock them for every character. Combat skills neither add stats nor combine to make new Specialties, instead they boost your characters with various effects like randomly increasing the damage they deal, making them move faster with a chance to teleport to the enemy, or having your mages resist having their spells canceled when they get damaged.
Unless you grind a bunch, it'll take you a pretty long while to max out everyone's skills.
Specialties can combine to create Super Specialties, where everyone in the team works together for some common goal, like using Blacksmith to turn ores into armor or Publishing to print a book that a character writes, which can either be sold to an editor for royalties down the line or read by party members to change their relationship values with that character. You will need a ton of SP to max every single skill, but it's worth waiting to spend any points at all until you visit Kurik on the north side of Krosse to buy the skill set that contains Determination. Putting points in it reduces the cost of every other skill for that character, so it's worth saving up a little bit of money and 80 SP to get things rolling.
One drawback of being able to create new things is that it's very heavily tied to Talents. Without the Taste talent, you'll probably fail to cook anything good since how would your character know if their dish is worth eating or not? Characters start with some Talents and you're able to unlock others through sheer force of will and retrying the relevant Specialty, but some characters can never learn certain Talents like fighters with the mage-only Blessing of Mana. Do you have the patience to save and reload several times? Or just wait to get Orchestra, which makes Talents easier to unlock. Any character that unlocks a new Talent gets a free 100SP so that's a pretty nice bonus. Another drawback that hits Specialties like Customization and Crafting is that you 'kinda need' a guide to get the most out of them. This system really does reward experimentation but you may never know if you're passing up something extremely powerful through your own ignorance or not.
1600 attack power and the first hit sends a spray of stars that do additional damage as well as give you a great chance to dizzy your target. You can make this as early as immediately after the Lacour Tournament of Arms.
Another neat thing about Star Ocean is the Private Actions system. You're given a prompt in front of most towns to press a button, and your team enters town and splits up to do their own thing. It's kinda neat and while most of the time you basically turn your team into NPCs that give you the same line over and over, this opens up several events that change the relationship values between characters. You might have an ally's childhood friend strike up a conversation about her dating prospects, you might have two characters looking at jewelry and ask you your opinion on them, or you might just see additional scenes that you have no other input on. This is another thing where having a big cast of potential characters in your team makes replay value, since who's present in your team determines what PAs you can view, though there are also event flags to keep in mind. SO2 touts over 80 different endings, but these are just post-plot character epilogues and the relationship values determines who ends up with whom or if they just go it alone. Same-sex pairings are friendly in nature and opposite-sex are romantic.
A couple of characters have special endings where they instead end up with an NPC instead of one of your party members.
They completely changed the voices between The Second Story and Second Evolution. It did take some getting used to but that's because I played the original so much that the original voices sounded 'right' to me. At least this time, almost all of the story-relevant text is fully-voiced and several Private Actions are too. The text has been changed quite a bit too, both for dialog and item descriptions. Second Evolution retains the emoticons over character's head to showcase their moods, but portraits now show up for all voiced text which can help further get the emotion across. Just not every character actually has more than one portrait. You don't have access to the Voice Collection from the get-go, but you can unlock characters in it by reaching the final save point with them in your party. You also get all of the battle voice clips without having to actually hear them too.
This is the best portrait in the game. Rena is devious!
There are now anime cutscenes, though they left some of the PS1 FMVs in. It might be a little jarring to see the wonders of late 90s 3D technology in a remake about 12 years after the original, but I didn't mind it. The anime cutscenes only show Claude and Rena since those are the only characters you're ever guaranteed to have and I guess there wasn't any realistic way to have alternate versions for every possible combination of characters. There's a 'hidden' alternate opening animation if you hit Circle at the main menu too.
All of the anime cutscenes are subtitled, though you can turn off the subtitles from the Movie Gallery menu too.
They also completely removed the 3D model for items and the morphing effect when you're doing Item Creation too. I kinda liked both of those to be honest, but their departure came with a nice bonus--you no longer need to sit through the lengthy morphing animation and you're even able to speed up the "item appears and explodes in a burst of light" here by holding Cross. You get the same starting/success/failure voice clips for every character so that can get a little annoying, though.
On the combat side, I mentioned fighters getting a three-hit combo, but Combat Skills no longer push the enemy around so they don't fly out of range of your attacks, so that's a pretty nice change. The Second Story had a ridiculous ten elements and Second Evolution compresses them to six. There are still quite a few fights you either have to lose or have to survive for an invisible amount of time like in the original, so that's kinda annoying. You're not told ahead of time so you might waste a bunch of items and effort only to be told that fight didn't count and you would've been better off just throwing everyone into the grinder to get it over with...but then with the surviving battles, that'd be kinda bad, right? They also fixed the crash that tended to happen in the Cave of Trials where the game fades to black as normal at the end of battle but then never returns. Given how you have no way to save once you enter, that's a pretty big relief for those seeking a good challenge without the system unintentionally working against you.
This is probably why I ended up with Rena and Celine together in my game. Non-romantically, but. Poor Celine made a love potion that had a massive area of effect, so naturally by getting close...
I don't have really too many gripes about this version of the game or the original. A slow beginning kinda harms it, but it picks up after a while. Second Evolution could've done with a quicksave feature even considering the PSP had a sleep mode and all. Sometimes you just want to step away without wondering if your system has enough battery left. I kinda started to lose interest when I got to the Four Fields in the second half because of how much of a slog some of them were. You can tune encounters to happen more often or less with items and a Specialty, but I steamrolled almost every fight using an okay team...barring the last few bosses. I actually had to disable Train (lower stats for more EXP) and Enlightenment (lower stats for more SP on level) to win, probably because I didn't grind at Fun City for a change.
If you're into JRPGs, you'd probably like this one. At the time, it offered something pretty different from the Final Fantasies and became an instant classic. That was well over 20 years ago though. Even almost ten years ago when this remake hit, it had some pretty good competition. Now near the end of the new teens? PSP's kind of dead and you can still grab this on PS4 and the Vita I think, but if you're willing to accept pixel artwork and prerendered areas to move around in and other things that make it show its age, I think you'd still enjoy this game. You can still do well with skipping Item Creation entirely and playing it like your standard JRPG, but making your own stuff is a big draw for me and it's the way to break this game wide open and take a dump on the difficulty...if you know how.
Abuse of 2D mechanics never gets old.
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Mega Man X6
I’m not doing other Mega Man games...for a while I guess.
Oh, X6. You...you're you. Somehow.
Three weeks after the events of X5, the Earth and her people are just barely started on the road to recovery after the impact of the Eurasia space colony's debris. Most of humanity now lives underground so it's up to the Reploids to begin the reconstruction. Surveying the damage, a Reploid scientist finds a peculiar piece of scrap and goes insane. Not only has he created a clone of the dead Zero, he has created a virus with the power to alter reality, and he's responsible for over a hundred innocent Reploids going missing. It's up to X alone to clean up this latest mess plaguing the world.
Just kidding, Zero's not dead. The manual poorly tries to hide his inclusion too. "Revived Hunter" and all.
See? Even the bosses were convinced!
Mega Man X6 is hard. It's frustrating, it's annoying, and I think it's fun in some parts and horrible in others. I still kinda like the game a little but I'll go ahead and say I won't recommend it because it pulls some ridiculous shit in level design. Not every stage but it's the "one bad apple spoils the bunch" thing for me. It feels unfinished or at least untested, and I've seen the sentiment that it feels like testers played through only with the Ultimate Armor and it's like the game was balanced around that. I just want to put that out there to start.
X starts with the Z-Saber this time, having taken it from his fallen comrade after their battle with Sigma three weeks ago. Unlike the broken secret it was in X3, X can only do a wide swing with it on the ground and can't combo with it the way Zero can. There are a couple of things that can only be damaged by it, though appropriately they're very rare and feel like an afterthought. It still has a decent fire rate and most bosses don't even have invulnerability frames to it if you're feeling devious. Continuing the trend set in X5, X6 sees X start in a nerfed Falcon Armor and he has two more armor suits to find all the parts of and build at once. The Falcon Armor no longer has flight but it gained an air dash, though strangely there are two distances depending on if you 'double jump' with it for a short dash or press the dash button in the air for a long one. Why? The charge shot can't pierce walls anymore, but the armor can charge special weapons this time. Though it reduces damage taken, everything seems to deal a ridiculous amount of damage anyway so it doesn't feel particularly effective.
The Blade Armor is the 'standard' armor suit. The charge shot releases a blast that can hit enemies multiple times, or you can hold Up while you release it and unleash a charged Z-Saber strike. It also has a Mach Dash feature where you stop in mid air and can do a damaging dash in the four cardinal directions instead of a standard air dash. Even straight down oddly enough. Its Giga Attack is to swing the Z-Saber twice and release a wave of energy each time...but this still won't shave off half of a boss' health bar, sadly. The charged shot was kind of a disappointment to me because it seemed entirely random whether or not it would stick to the enemy and deal constant damage or not. Not to mention that the shot itself actually is pretty weak when the sticky part fails or when you fight bosses since they're immune to it anyway. Worse yet, the damage output on the charged saber slash is worse than the plain X/Falcon Armor charged shot for most bosses. At least it hits multiple times on big enemies.
Toad Man torments you from beyond the grave.
The Shadow Armor is a modification of the Gaea Armor from X5. Instead of heavy plate metal, you become a sleek ninja in black! X's standard shots become shurikens with a slightly random trajectory, and the charged shot is once again a charged Z-Saber slash without needing to press another button to trigger. The Giga Attack is a looping wave of energy around X that deals pretty heavy damage if you're near enough to an enemy when you use it. It's somewhat better than the Gaea Armor mostly because you're not slowed down and you can actually use Parts with it this time, though you still don't have an air dash. It goes amazingly well with Ultimate Buster because there's almost no downtime between slashes and you can hack things down fairly quickly with it. Its charged slashes did pretty heavy damage to bosses, but it also slowed the game down because you were stuck in the animation while the blade 'ting'ed on their invulnerability frames. You can do a high vertical jump and stick to the ceiling if you connect, so you can rain stars down on enemies below. Zero has a similar power won off of a boss too.
For once, there’s no blue on X at all.
Zero isn't available at the start, but you unlock him by tracking down and destroying his loathsome copy. Zero is ridiculously strong in this game even without the Black Zero code. He has a new set of sprites and the Z-Saber is more...solid, I guess? Several attacks seem to hit several times and I made great use of the standard jump attack to clear out enemies. He has his Z-Buster again but it was buffed heavily from X5. It not only fires faster so you're not stuck in the animation nearly as long, but it hits pretty hard and bosses have the same non-existent mercy invincibility like with X spamming the Z-Saber. Meaning you can literally burst down some bosses with it as long as they're on the ground since you still have to be grounded and stop to fire. He can now double jump and air dash (but not at the same time) by default too.
So strong he can glitch reality too!
Alia's back! And she's optional! She has a little alert icon and notification beep but if you don't press Select, she won't say anything. She only has a couple of forced transmissions but she's out of the way otherwise. She still doesn't really have much helpful info to give you. The most jarring thing was that she has one for every boss but she only tells you to 'ready your weapons just in case' instead of 'if you destroy this guy's rock, he'll bring bigger ones out so use the ropes to get around them' or something. I did like that X and Zero will actually respond back to Alia when you answer at least.
Parts return too, and this time they're held by the Reploids you need to rescue in the stages. The system is a little different, since instead of being restricted on slots based on wearing armor or not, you instead have slots opened by your Hunter Rank. That's increased by collecting Nightmare Souls from the Nightmare Virus drones and by destroying the bosses. There are also Limited Parts you eventually unlock the use of that provide you a buff for a very short time once per stage, like having every shot be a charged shot with no delay or increasing your damage output, but I honestly used the Life Recover Part to have a third energy refill to go with the two Sub Tanks.
As for the Nightmare Virus, it exists in two ways. The drones are found floating in every stage. They'll either slowly try to collide with you or shoot you from a distance (or try to teleport onto you on Xtreme mode). When you kill them, they drop a blue orb that quickly shifts into a smaller blue orb, and then the drone revives itself and doesn't leave an orb this time. The orb is the Nightmare Soul that goes towards increasing your Hunter Rank, so collect it quickly to get the most points! But that's not why they're dangerous. They're often found near the Reploids you need to rescue and they'll sometimes ignore you and float over to them. If they latch onto a Reploid, they'll convert them into a Maverick. What makes this really bad is that if that Reploid had a Part, it's gone forever. The transformation is permanent so you'll have to reload your save to try again. Some of the positioning of the drones and rescuees is outright spiteful (one in Infinity Mijinion's secret route comes to mind since the drone is literally almost on top of the Reploid already, so if you don't destroy the drone as soon as it comes on screen, that Reploid is toast). The drones also return if you scroll them off screen even if you took their Soul. And they won't drop a second Soul even if you leave the stage and come back...until you push a new Nightmare Phenomenon to that stage.
“I can’t see shit, can you?“ --Cannonball Run
The other way is the Nightmare Phenomenon, which is somewhat of a callback to the first X game, where visiting one stage affects others in some way (like how beating Chill Penguin froze over Flame Mammoth's factory). Some of the effects are minor and some are very aggravating. The effects start as soon as you visit any of the eight stages and they are permanent until you overwrite the effect with another one--it's impossible to completely clear a stage of the Phenomenon and the only way to play a stage without any at all is to make that one your first stage played once you clear the intro. What stages are affected by what Phenomenon is set in stone, but you'll be able to tell which ones just got the effect of the stage you just played by the boss portrait being red. A couple can be helpful and you can destroy the additions created by a couple more, but they'll hinder you some way or another.
The music's kinda different this time around since it's not very rock-based. There's still some electric guitars here and there but it sounds a bit different than X5. Commander Yammark's stage has a pretty nice pan flute (I think) that's kinda mellow, Shield Sheldon's got lovely chimes, Blaze Heatnix has speed metal to run counter to his stage... There's a remix of the X-Hunter base theme from X2, and Zero gets a remix of his second theme from X1. The boss theme is kinda funky too, and I kinda like the ominous pipe organ in the stage select theme. Kinda really sells the dreadful feeling the plot gives since this newest crisis came on the heels of the last one. Not all the music is full of winners though. What were they thinking with Ground Scaravich's?
The game was made in under a year and it really could've used an extra layer of polish or a balance pass or so on. The localization is rough translation and comes off as really awkward. While all of the cutscenes are voiced, they're only in Japanese. I'm not one of those people who go uguu over kawaii seiyuu so it did nothing for me. This is also the only game in the entire series (that I know of) that actually kept the Japanese opening and credits audio, since the localizations tended to replace the music entirely due to licensing and so on. Apparently the guy singing the two opening themes also voices X, in a weird bit of trivia.
Okay, time to complain. I may as well do a breakdown of every stage.
Commander Yammark's stage isn't bad and it's a good one to start out with since the boss is a pushover and his weapon isn't bad, combining a rotary shield and shooting with it. The mantis Mechaniloids are annoying because their thrown scythes have a pretty big reach and they deal a fair amount of damage (I'll be saying the second bit a lot, I know). There's one blind jump over spikes but the rest of the stage isn't bad. His Nightmare Phenomenon causes little fireflies to fly near you, sometimes crashing into you but they'll get in the way of your shots since they're invulnerable to everything but the Yammar Option. A minor nuisance.
Rainy Turtloid is another stage that isn't bad, good music. The gimmick here is that there are sections of acid rain that will slowly sap your health while you try to find and destroy little control modules to take down the shield on the rain generator. There are at least little stations you can stand on to fully recover your health but you have to contend with enemies while you hunt them down. This stage also has these big purple brutes that block all of your attacks and only drop their guard to briefly attack. Just going around them wasn't always an option and they just slowed things down considerably. There's a platforming section over a pit near the end where you need to transfer from one vertical rocket moving sideways to another at different heights. There's a section at the end with several spiked tunnels that have things on the other side you have to air-dash through and that's a chore and a half because it's so easy to get it wrong and die. You don't need to get through to finish the stage, but if you want the secret route, an Armor capsule, and so on... The stage isn't bad but becomes much more difficult with Infinity Mijion's Phenomenon in effect because you can't see shit and you're already playing hide-and-seek with the modules while your health slowly disappears. The boss isn't that bad, but he's so big that it's hard to get around him when he goes buzzsawing in his arena. The tiny shot of the Falcon Armor might not be a good response to his missiles either. His Phenomenon causes non-damaging wind and rain to screw with your jumps.
“You have two rolls of toilet paper for hair, you can’t talk shit about me!”
Blizzard Wolfang isn't bad either. Your standard snowy/icy stage with periodic avalanches that pass through the holes in the stage and all. Alia actually has good advice here (if you're sliding, jump straight up to stop your forward momentum) for a change. There are a couple of sections near the end that deal with falling ice. The first couple have blocks falling that will heavily damage you if they land on you, one at a time. Wait for them to pile up to get out of the pit (yes, you have to go into the pit to continue even if you can jump across). The last part instead has rows of blocks falling with a single block gap for you to pass through. When the line settles, that gap gets filled and if you're caught in it when it closes, you die. Wolfang himself isn't that bad and he's actually who I was thinking of when I said that you could spam the Z-Buster to kill some bosses. His Phenomenon only affects Metal Shark Player's stage by adding icy floors to parts of the level. You actually need Blaze Heatnix's effect to open an additional area here too.
Yeah, I’m kind of a Maverick Hunter so I kinda fight the bad guys. Thanks though?
Shield Sheldon's stage has some puzzles in the form of the 'reflect lasers to the goal' style, where you manually hit a mirror and then goad the laser into aiming at you so it bounces to the end. It's also extremely short for some reason. Like...I'm pretty sure not even the GameBoy Mega Man had stages that short. The fight is pretty easy though it can take longer than his actual stage because there are several points where you either can't hit him or have to hope he's going to be near where you are so you can smack him. His effect causes phantoms of the other hunter to appear in some stages and fly at you after hanging in the air for a moment.
Ground Scaravich's stage isn't bad but it's terrible if you're trying to 100% the game. The music's terrible too. The reason that it's a pain for completionists is that there are random sections in four parts of the stage and you of course find the armor capsules and all of the Reploids and so on there. This stage has the highest number of Nightmare drones than any other, probably not even counting total all the ones found in every room configuration. It doesn't really pull any shit on you other than the rocks spawning in to crash into you and all of the Nightmares getting in your way. His fight isn't that bad either (X6 seems to fall under the 'hard stages, easy bosses' trope) but try not to destroy his rock or he'll increase the size a little faster than normal. Pay attention to the small ropes on the wall! His Nightmare effect causes blocks to spawn that largely just take up space but can be destroyed with his weapon or pushed around, depending on the color.
Infinity Mijinion sees you getting pursued by a gigantic robot that constantly sends attacks from the background to the foreground, while you plow through droves of birds and drones and rescuees. Then you destroy one power cable and the robot changes its attacks while you go through more of the same. This stage is short too and it's the easiest to unlock Zero since the secret route portal is right in your face when Illumina blows up for good. Mijinion is a pain in the ass to fight since he constantly generates identical copies and all of them start to fill the screen with giant bubbles. His Nightmare effect is probably the worst too since it darkens the screen and reduces the visible area to only where two rotating spotlights intersect--it's a blessing that it doesn't show up on more stages than it does.
Metal Shark Player is a lovely stage where you're constantly threatened by the overhead crushing press while you traverse the piles of junk and enemies. The first part can be cheesed if you place the Ride Armor somewhere high, but the second part gets revenge on you hard. You know how X and Zero can duck into one 'block' height areas, right? Did you know that if you duck into a one block high gap and take damage, you stand up and instantly die? The game knows. There are a couple of tricky jumps too like where you have to get around a low lip on the ceiling over a bed of spikes, and the secret route turns on the conveyor belt. It's also a really long stage due to all of the waiting involved, so maybe his and Shield Sheldon's combine into two average X stages. His Nightmare Phenomenon effect causes metal blocks to spawn that periodically rise up and fall back down. You can ride them, but you'll get hurt if they crush you or slam you into the ceiling. You can use his weapon to destroy them at least.
Don’t ask how it’s crushing Zero’s head and not killing him.
And...Blaze Heatnix. You might think the high-speed guitars will make for a fast-paced foray but you're wrong. This stage is one of the two that ruins the rest of the game for me. You warp in, you drop down into a room and you're immediately met with a gigantic lifebar that belongs to a ring of a snake that takes up a good portion of the screen. There are four weak points making up the corners of a box. The snake will move around its arena on its own while the weak points shoot at you. After a long slog, you move on and get to what the real stage is, going through a factory while fire plumes flare up in front of you. You pass through a door and end up in another arena. Another huge life bar. What. You press on. Another one. ANOTHER ONE. You fight either five or six of the bastards through a standard run of the area. Heatnix himself isn't bad but I'm pretty sure the lava he summons instantly kills you like in the stage. I never bothered to try it. Heatnix's stage isn't bad apart from the snakes, but they just refuse to die unless you can time a Giga Attack or charged Metal Anchor well, on top of having to do it several times. A sub-boss that has more health than just about every boss in the entire game SIX TIMES. Let's not forget one of the last ones is while you're being chased by rising lava while the snake flies up out of the lava--if you're not in a good position to hit one of the weak points, you're going to have to wait to move on! Ugh. And...uh, his Nightmare effect causes fireballs to rain down on parts of the stage. Whoopie.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
One positive thing I can say about Gate's Laboratory is that it at least feels like Gate is really trying to kill you. I guess that explains why he uses a remix of one of the X-Hunter fortress stage musics here. I hope you like spikes. I hope you like accidentally nicking one and dying. A lot. Gate really does pull out the stops here because it throws a pretty big variety of things at you, and several stage gimmicks at the same time. And it feels cheap as fuck too. You enter a room and see a door on the other side because it's a one-screen room. And then the fire below you starts moving. If you didn't know to immediately get across to the other door, you'd be dead again. Nightmare Mother is a hard boss too that involves needing to hit two 'twins' after they rotate around the room and pull their vulnerable eyes out of their huge square bodies. I hope you have a good vantage angle, and I hope you don't destroy one too early because its corpse will start screwing up the pattern. At least you get to leave when you kill it--you don't when you finally take out High-Max for good, and that's another fight that drags on even though his life bar isn't that big. Once he's dead, you move onto another part of the stage and I wasn't about to test to see if I'd have to do the entire second section as well as High-Max if I left.
From humble beginnings....
Not only are you fighting the automatic scroll of having the fire below, the ice will impede your progress and the spikes you can't see above will kill you if you jump in the wrong spot. Have fun!
Come to think of it, didn't Sigma Palace in X8 have a bunch of spikes? I wonder why I can't remember that.
And the Gate fight sucks. He's invulnerable to everything, a gimmick that High-Max almost had. You have to kill Gate by waiting for him to throw one of his spheres out and then you destroy that and the resulting shrapnel can damage him (and you if you're not careful). I hope you like jumping around platforms over a giant pit while Gate just floats around. Oh, and he'll start destroying platforms even though they come back after a while. Another tedious long slog, made worse by having to take on High-Max prior so your Sub Tanks might be suffering. Then you get to the rematches and those aren't bad, and you fight basically Zombie Sigma. It's, uh, an experience because he's super batshit crazy here as opposed to being the coolheaded chessmaster of prior games. No really, look at what he says when you get to the final battle. Sigma's nuts.
At least this does involve one of X's best quotes. "I have to work on the reconstruction of the planet now. I can't afford to waste time on you."
The observant player may notice Sigma doesn't have his signature blue eyes here--but remember his skull at the very end of X5 that had red eyes? I wonder if this was an intentional callback.
ZELLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO His rambling to X is as bad.
So yeah. I've written enough (no, it can't be!) but for all the steps forward that X6 does right like with the music in most parts and the better Parts system (even though needing to rescue Reploids is kinda tedious and frustrating with some of the Nightmare placements) and how absolutely ridiculously strong Zero is...it's probably not worth for you to try. If you're a Mega Man fan then you're probably going to try it, but I hope you have patience (and save states) because parts of it will test yours. I know it's kinda dumb to not recommend a game just because of a small portion of it, but I've mentally done it with other games, where I'm kinda okay with it and then one part makes me steer hard into "fuck this shit" territory. I can kinda tolerate it because I like Mega Man so much, but it's probably a terrible introduction to the series as a whole.
You're not actually supposed to have Zero fight this copy, but the power of cheat codes can do anything.
Also, I rarely do this but someone on Youtube did a no damage no armor no special weapon non-tool-assisted speedrun on Xtreme mode with unarmored X. It's worth a watch just to see how much shit the game throws at you when you're off Normal. And how hard the game stacks the deck when you're without an air dash at the minimum.
X.
Zero.
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Mega Man X5
Yep, we’re doing this one and X6 to come too!
I still kinda remember buying Mega Man X5 so long ago. I had a gift card for Best Buy for my birthday so I bought it and a gamepad for my PC. Of the three PS1 X games, I'd say X5 is my favorite and it rates highly across the entire series for me too.
In Sigma's latest plot, he intentionally loses a battle against the Maverick Hunters in order to spread his virus around the world. Not content with just that, he has corrupted a space colony and it's now on a collision course with Earth. X and Zero need to get moving because that colony's going to touch down in only a matter of hours!
X5 is a bit different than X4. X and Zero can both duck, a first for the entire Mega Man series as far as I remember. You're still able to dash under attacks at least, but there are a few places where you'll need to squat to not die. There are also 'wire hangers' that allow the heroes to attach to ropes in the environment and of course there are hazards to watch out for while you cling onto them. There is also a infection meter. The Sigma Virus manifests as large Sigma heads and they slowly try to collide with your character. After repeated contact, you enter Caution, Danger, and finally Virus status where you take constant damage as X...or strangely become invulnerable as Zero. Huh.
That’s some tight hitbox work.
Two new control features are Auto Charge and Rapid Fire. Auto Charge automatically has X charge his buster when you're not pressing square but it won't work for special weapons, while Rapid Fire will fire as fast as possible while you hold square or triangle, meaning you can't charge special weapons with it active. Auto Charge at least is a very nice quality of life change since now you won't have to stretch your thumb across three face buttons to hold a charge while you dash-jump...but then I always change my controls to mimic Mega Man Zero with dash on L1/left shoulder and special weapons on R1/right shoulder.
There's also the time limit. Mega Man games aren't known for being terribly lengthy affairs, but the game instead docks you one hour of the initial 16 hour time limit every time you enter a stage regardless of how much real time you spend in it. It's not really an issue if you like to tackle the stages in a set order and collect items as you go and come back later, but if you like to get a bunch of upgrades before you take on the bosses, that isn't as easy to pull off here. There are two plans to deal with the space colony and you only need to deal with four Mavericks at a time for each of them, but there is only one opportunity to gain time and it only buys you one hour. I found it a little restrictive even though you're given enough time to visit each stage twice.
Alia is new too. She's the new Navigator for the Maverick Hunters and while she means well, she'll stop your gameplay at various points to explain things to you that you may or may not be aware of already. That she's not optional is kind of a major issue that X6 and X8 addressed well (probably X7 too but I've yet to play it). You're not stopped in the middle of dangerous jumps or anything but it's still pretty jarring. At least she only chimes in the first time through an area.
I won’t explain the visual pun but why do they have giant pistols back there?
There are Reploids in stages in need of rescue. Touching one will grant you an extra life and refill some of your health, but you're not docked points or anything by skipping them. They're technically a way to farm out lives at least.
Instead of the completely separate campaigns, you can swap off between X and Zero when starting a stage, as well as the different armors for X (or none at all, too). While it's a nice idea and necessary to let you finish the game if you get the bad ending route, I still would just do one save of X and one of Zero because only the current hero gets Heart Tanks or post-boss stat-ups, and each hero gets a bonus if you start the game with them too. At least this time both of them show up in story sequences!
X can't shoot through walls starting in this installment. The game thankfully doesn't taunt you repeatedly with this fact but it is annoying more than dangerous. The armor system in this game doesn't let you gradually build a complete suit of armor, instead seeing you gather programs that become the full suit when all four parts are collected, and there are two new sets this time. Starting the game with X grants you a slightly nerfed Fourth Armor from X4. You have the Plasma Shot but lose the infinite weapon use and Nova Strike, but you still have the damage reduction, air dash, chargeable special weapons, and hover jets capabilities.
The Falcon Armor is designed around mobility. Its main draw is the invulnerable flight that replaces the air-dash, and this lets you crash into enemies unharmed for a few seconds or just explore in the air for a little bit. Its buster also has a smaller projectile that cuts through terrain at the cost of not charging up special weapons. It has a Giga Attack that hits everything on the screen too. The Gaea Armor is instead a slow, plodding juggernaut that can't use special weapons at all but instead has more damaging projectiles, a much shorter charge time on the charged shot, and complete immunity to spikes. Its Giga Attack is a sphere of destruction focused right in front of X but at least he's invulnerable during it. The Ultimate Armor returns through a cheat code, but it can actually be unlocked in another way, though it comes near the end of the game. It's still as powerful as in X4 with the infinite Nova Strike.
Too bad boss rematches have really long lifebars.
Zero at least starts with an air-dash this time and none of the Mavericks give him mobility powers only. Starting with Zero grants him the use of the Z-Buster, which I largely found to be a disappointment. It takes a moment to fire and it has no charge or rapid fire capability, on top of not being all that strong either. Whichever hero you start the game with removes the bonus from the other, so starting with X removes the Z-Buster and Zero takes away the Fourth Armor. Zero can collect X's armor parts but won't get the benefit from them, but like the Ultimate Armor, it's possible to unlock Black Zero near the end and this time it actually isn't just a cosmetic change! One thing I didn't like in this game is that you're not told how to perform the special techniques like the Get Weapon screen did in X4. I hope you kept your manual or have a FAQ handy.
You know X means business when he busts out the Ultimate Armor to kick your ass.
Yet another new feature is Parts. Bosses start dropping them after the first few hours have passed, and which Part you receive depends on the boss and whether you chose the Life+ or the Energy+ bonus after their defeat, though you'll have to wait a couple of hours to actually receive the Part too. Parts aren't anything really dramatic but they provide nice bonuses like increasing the life/weapon energy restored on pickups, making you jump higher, or letting you destroy the Sigma Virus heads in the stages. Plain X and Zero can use four Parts at a time, the Fourth, Falcon, and Ultimate Armors can use two, and the Gaea Armor can't use any. It's worth looking in a guide to plan what Parts you want to customize how your hunter performs. I'm a sucker for customization so I really like the system, as obtuse as it is.
Since I rarely get to use the Gaea Armor except for one specific stage near the end of the game, I decided to try cheating to start with it and go through the game that way. While having a really strong buster is nice for much of the game, the loss in mobility isn't really worth it. There's a part in Slash Grizzly's stage where you have to kinda quickly make your way through an area before you die and that was pretty damned hard. It's a breeze with any other Armor but having to carefully manuever past the instant-kill drills with a shortened and slower dash and move speed made for a poor experience. There's another section that recreates Quick Man's stage from Mega Man 2 with the instant-death lasers and I'm not sure it's possible to get through with the Gaea Armor outside of tool assistance (but I'd love to be wrong). It was still an interesting experience all the same.
Gulp.
There are a few callbacks to the games of old, given X5 was originally going to be the X series finale at one time. The Dr. Light theme is a remix from X1, one of the fortress stages uses the instant-death lasers from Quick Man's stage as I said above, you fight a Devil as well as a new Rangda Bangda, the music for Duff McWhalen's stage is a remix of Bubble Crab from X2...and in terms of music, the soundtrack wasn't bad. I really liked the fortress stages theme music as well as the showdown theme near the end of the game. A couple of tracks like Volt Krak--er, Squid Adler's seemed kinda out of place. The stage does start with a Ride Chaser section but a high-tempo song like that doesn't really fit a puzzle-heavy stage around getting doors open.
X5 didn't do some things well. I mentioned Alia above but there were some minor things like all of the Mavericks getting Guns 'n Roses-inspired names in the localization, to some major things like boss rematches having ridiculous health bars. Mattrex also has a stupidly long stunned animation when you hit him with his weakness and it almost feels like it was put in to spite speedrunners because you can't damage him until he breaks out of it. The thing with the Sigma Virus drones sounds like a legitimate threat on paper, but (at least on Normal mode) some stages either don't have any show up or there's just a small number that you can safely absorb or easily avoid because they're so slow. I'm not saying that they should've had whole waves coming after you but it just felt like a wasted effort. The improved drones in the fortress stages at least potentially dangerous if less-easily evaded.
I said X4 was kinda bland and X5 is a step up from that even if it's just because it has more content in general with two (or three) suits of Armor for X on top of customization potential through the Parts system. It fixes some of the issues I had with X4 and brings a couple of its own to the table, but of the three PS1 games, I think I'd put it at the top of the list.
I’m bragging here, but it’s actually possible to have the Enigma succeed. Without all of its upgrades too! Some people have had it work immediately after the intro stage even.
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Mega Man X4
Every few years, I get the urge to play Mega Man. This time I only restricted it to the PS1 X titles instead of starting with the SNES X games, or even going back to the NES with the original series. I've had X4 for forever given I got it not long after it released. Like with other emulated titles, I played this under Retroarch with an Xbox 360 controller.
A Maverick attack at Sky Lagoon brings the floating city down upon another on the ground, resulting in severe casualties. The Colonel of Repliforce, responding to the attack in order to save his sister caught in the crossfire, is detained and requested to return to Maverick Hunter HQ for questioning. He refuses to disarm and leaves, causing the entire Repliforce to be labeled as Mavericks. Repliforce then stages a coup in order to establish an independent nation for Reploids only. And someone familiar is behind the scenes, pulling the Maverick Hunters' and Repliforce's strings to bring them into conflict...
The X series got several enhancements that came with jumping from a 16- to a 32-bit platform like bigger and more detailed spritework, more detailed environments, fully-animated voiced cutscenes, higher-quality music (that doesn't loop on the PS1 but does on the Saturn), pre-battle boss banter, as well as making Zero fully playable in a style completely separate from X. It is also somewhat of a step backwards from X3 in terms of the "things to do" department. There are no roaming hunters to defeat/destroy that change future bosses, there are no Ride Armors to collect, no armor chips...it's more straightforward like X1. You have eight bosses to kill, eight Heart Tanks to collect, etc. One thing that stands out is that the Fourth Armor has two different arms parts that can be swapped out if you revisit the capsules containing them.
If you've never played any of the games in the series, these are side-scrolling platformers. You warp into a stage and are tasked with getting to the other end of the area alive by destroying or avoiding enemies and stage hazards like fire bursting out of the ground or spikes that instantly kill you when touched. This applies to pretty much every game that's not part of the Battle Network, Starforce, or Legends series, but the X games stand out from the Classic series with the original Mega Man due to the higher speed you traverse levels through an on-demand burst of speed called 'dash' that can initially only be triggered on the ground. There is also the potential to explore with the wall-kick feature, where you jump at a wall and keep holding that direction while you jump repeatedly. X is also able to find armor capsules hidden away in the stages that enhance his abilities such as body armor that reduces the health lost when hurt, or leg parts that allow you to do a dash in mid-air. Destroying one of the eight bosses at the end of the standard set of stages earns you a limited-use special weapon that also is the weakness of another boss. There is a pattern you can learn and follow to tackle bosses in a set order so you always have the best weapon ready when you face them down. When you finish the initial eight stages, you move onto the final leg of the game where you face the true antagonist of the game as well as have rematch fights against the eight bosses you killed already.
Ride ‘em, cow...robot? There’s only one Ride Chaser-only stage in this game but I remember X8 had two.
X plays pretty much the same as always. The legs armor upgrade allows air dashing (only left/right, no more up) as well as a temporary hover with the option to slightly move forward or backwards at the cost of flight time, the body part reduces damage and charges up an invulnerable tackle Nova Strike, and the head part gives special weapons unlimited ammo when using their uncharged versions. The arms part either allows you to store up four charged shots or lets you release a massive shot that lingers when it strikes an enemy to deal extra damage, and both let you charge special weapons as always. I found the Stock Charge Shot to be pretty underwhelming. It takes a little longer to charge but for some reason it doesn't fire when you let go of the button, and that threw me off quite a bit. Four charged shots on-demand should sound really good, but you can't combo bosses with them and their smaller size makes them a little harder to use in the stages. Plasma Charge Shot on the other hand releases a gigantic blast and the lingering damage tears up regular enemies. And will grate your ears with the repeating 'ting' sound when you hit something invulnerable.
Zero has given up his buster and instead uses the Z-Saber exclusively. He's geared more for experienced players since he has to fight up close, but he has a damaging three-hit combo to decimate enemies. He collects Heart Tanks and Sub Tanks and all just like X, but he has no armor capsule upgrades so his game is harder overall. He has a three-hit saber combo that will ignore the boss' invulnerable grace period until all the hits land. Zero later gets a double jump and a Giga Attack of his own, but I largely felt like the devs didn't really know where to take Zero in this game given two of his eight won techniques aren't actual attacks, just upgrades like an air dash or destroying shots with the saber. Zero also has a personal stake in the story given Iris is somewhat his girlfriend, and her brother is Repliforce's Colonel. And if you didn’t catch the hint in X2, this game spells out who made Zero if you’re familiar with the Classic series.
X has a variation of the Fourth Armor unlocked when you use a cheat code at the character select screen. Use it and access an armor capsule to be granted the entire Ultimate Armor at once. The only differences between it and the Fourth Armor is that it can only use the Plasma Charge Shot and it has infinite use of the Nova Strike Giga Attack. Zero has a code too but it only changes the color of his armor to black--a reference to the fake Zero from X2--and this doesn't have any gameplay impact unfortunately.
X5 and X6 at least change the color of his dash afterimages with Black Zero active.
I thought that the stages felt a little longer than in older games, but that also is helped by every stage being split into two parts separated by a loading screen. At least each half has some different features, like Cyber Peacock's stage having time trials in part 1 and gravity puzzles in part 2, or Storm Owl part 1 seeing you traverse smaller floating ships to taking on miniature laser cannons in part 2. Jet Stingray is the only stage that's entirely autoscroll on a speeder bike up until the boss fight, and for some reason, Frost Walrus part 2 has a completely different background music from part 1. The stage graphics change between both halves too and I thought that was nice for a change of scenery at least.
There aren't many animated cutscenes but they're not bad for the later 90s style you may or may not remember. Zero has a pretty nice one on his path that shows his and Sigma's first encounter before the events of the first game that's worth watching, though there's a sad one right before this. People derided the voicework and I can understand why since it's okay at best. They for some reason reused Mega Man's voice actress from Mega Man 8 to voice X, apparently to reinforce the idea that Rock is somehow also his little brother, X. There are a few voice clips during gameplay, though it gets a little annoying since they're tied to jumping or attacking, like Zero's three-hit combo (hoo hah HOOOOH forever).
You want to know how I got these scars? It depends on if you’re thinking of the original continuity or the one where Day of Sigma takes place and Sigma gets Shining Finger’d by X.
The controls felt great and the PS1 games allow X the use of his X-Buster as well as special weapons by putting them on Square and Triangle by default which really helps flexibility. Sometimes you want to keep a special weapon readied while you have the buster charging or whatever. The PS1 games have an interesting quirk with the dash feature in that if you hold down the dash button, you can get the momentum and afterimages of a dash jump when you jump, even while standing still or just running. It doesn't have much practical use but repeated short hops with this can be one way to speed across relatively even terrain. It seems to be an on-ground implementation of dash walljumps that appear in the other games.
Overall, X4 isn't really a bad game. The big draw for a lot of people was to finally play as Zero without him being a one-life wonder like in X3, and he can actually take on bosses this time. The game's not really too hard even though the number of Sub Tanks got cut in half (but there's now a Weapon flavor and another item that bumps you to four lives when starting a stage if below four), and it's nice that you can fill the Sub Tanks even if your health isn't maxed. Difficulty is pretty average with a couple of bosses being more annoying than outright difficult, though Sigma is one of them. It's worth playing twice so you go through with X and Zero and see their side of the story, but for some reason there's no real mention or interaction with the character you're not playing.
Stuff about to blow up.
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Path of Exile
Path of Exile is a free-to-play Diablo-like action RPG that I put about 39 hours into this time around before I decided to call it quits halfway through Act 6. I rolled a Witch/Necromancer and in a shocking display of self-control, I actually didn't create one of each class to play an hour in. I didn't play with anyone nor did I trade with people, and I didn't put any money into the game through microtransactions.
For your crimes against Oriath and her people, you are hereby exiled to the continent of Wraeclast. May God have mercy on your soul because Wraeclast won't. Wraeclast is a sprawling wilderness with a variety of locales, as well as plenty of animals, people, and horrible monsters ready to kill you. Oh, and there's the little problem of the dead not staying down too.
The Sinister Six.
I originally played Path of Exile several years ago when it first released. I tried to play with some people I knew but I was constantly rushed and I couldn't even fight anything because it was all dead already, so I wasn't able to really drink in the game. The game was also kinda notorious for the desyncs then too, so I just dropped it and forgot about it for a long time. Some other friends were talking about it recently so I decided to check it out and play it alone at my own pace, doing an unofficial Solo Self-Found run where you cannot party with or accept items from other players.
I went with a Witch summoner because that's kind of my go-to build for Diablolikes where possible. I like the idea of meatshields and it's not like I let them do all the work. By the time I stopped, I had a small army consisting of zombies, totem-summoned skeletons, flaming skulls, a golem, an animated guardian, and whatever items I could turn into temporary allies. And all of these were buffed by one aura to deal extra cold damage while a second aura made enemies vulnerable to it. It worked for the most part, though the curse-aura still had terrible range despite me trying to improve it.
There are a few things Path of Exile does differently from other games in the genre. While there are six starting classes, they're not set in stone as far as stats or skills go. The class you select really only influences your starting point on the massive 'skill forest' of passives you can slowly traverse as you gain levels. My Witch honestly could've become an armor-clad hulk swinging around a tree if I wanted, just it'd cost me more points in the end compared to the Marauder. If you've played Final Fantasy X, then you could think of it as being like the Sphere Grid without any sections to unlock for each character.
Might need to squint a little.
Another thing is that no class has any default skills, instead they're all found in Skill Gems which any class can use provided they have the right stats and an open slot on their equipped gear that matches the gem's color. So it's kind of like Final Fantasy VII's Materia system. There are even gems that buff other gems passively as long as they're physically linked in gear to other gems. For example, I had a basic Frostbolt to clear out pots and I'd cast it on enemies since it'd slowly cut through them for a good distance, and I had a Volley Support gem linked to it that made it cast three bolts in a wide formation. Skill Gems can be quest rewards, but they can be bought from some vendors too.
Jesus. Oh, it gets better--that water on the bottom-right? That’s blood. You even see people(?) writhing in it later. There are even walls made of bodies in this part too.
And another thing is that instead of finding potions dropping off of mooks semi-regularly, you instead have up to five equipped Flasks at a time that restore health or mana, or provide another short-lived effect. These can also be enchanted, providing effects such as giving a portion of the health restoration to your minions, resistances while you're recovering, a speed boost, and so on. Flasks have a maximum amount of 'charges' and so many of those are consumed on use, and charges are slowly restored as you kill enemies. Flasks also stop working when you hit full on whatever you were restoring, and this applies to the magical effects any enhanced ones carry.
And yet another thing is that there is no gold at all. The game's currency is tied around items found in the wild or received from NPCs for your junk and while these items have some modium of value, they're also functional. One type upgrades the quality of weapons, another adds a prefix or suffix to a magic item, one makes an enchanted item back to its default white state, another unpredictably alters an item with no way to alter it further...and so on. I admittedly didn't use very many of the currency orbs so they just clogged up my stash, but Path of Exile has a pretty robust crafting system if you're willing to get all of the currency items necessary for your dream gear. Not to mention there are secret vendor 'recipes' if you turn in specific items to generate a specific result, and thankfully you don't need to teach these to NPCs...but you'll need to look them up yourself or luck into them by accident.
There’s actually a recipe’s components here if you can believe it.
The game is constantly updated and gets new features pretty regularly. I started a bit after the new Abyss content was added tenatively, where glowing nodes on the ground spawn growing fissures full of enemies and a strong rare enemy appears guarding a treasure chest that gets sealed if you take too long to kill the king mook and his lackeys. They're adding a Bestiary League in a few days that apparently involves you capturing monsters...presumably to do battle with other people who have done the same thing. From what I understand, Leagues are a way of testing new content with a character that can't interact with your old Standard League characters before said features are added to the game in full for everyone. Abyss League had a number of achievements that once you completed so many, you'd get free cosmetics related to it but I didn't get that many down.
I liked the setting. The first act is mostly rocky beaches and caves with a bit of a muddy marshy area or dried lake bed thrown in for good measure. Later acts throw in some Greco-Roman-inspired architecture which reminds me of how long I've neglected Titan Quest, and I'm a nerd for that stuff too. There's a lot of New Zealand-inspired mythology present, poignant given that's where the devs are from and it's a nice change given the only place I'd expect to find any of that is a Shin Megami Tensei game. None of the towns are really towns but more like encampments, tiny places that have a compact selection of NPCs but also feel like they're in danger of being overrun at any time. Quests aren't anything novel, but I liked not really having a primary antagonist at the very start. Compare the first two Diablo games where you know Diablo/The Dark Wanderer are your eventual goals and your journey is all about facing off with them at some point. Here, you're pretty much making yourself useful to the townspeople as you cut down hordes of monsters and explore the continent...though some antagonists do eventually show up.
Almost all of the microtransactions are for cosmetics. You are able to buy stash tabs (you start with four generic ones for your account) but I didn't have a problem with that, but I also only had one character instead of the ten you're able to make for free. I didn't look in the store for anything so I can't really comment on what's there or what's not. I don't think there are any pay-to-win elements, just stash tabs are the only things that impact gameplay as far as I know.
Uh...one bad mamma-jamma?
I had a few problems with the game though. The biggest one was that the graphics quality was a bit too much for my computer, even on the lowest settings and switching to Direct X9. I originally had the game on my secondary HDD but I semi-regularly would get logged out of the game (failed to join instance) on trying to return to town, and I'd get momentary lock-ups when other people with a bunch of visual cosmetics would warp in. Those mostly went away when I put the game on my SSD, but that didn't last. The later areas have enemies that have pretty intense attacks and this led to the game freezing for a moment while the action continued on the server. This wound up killing me more than a few times. I know I need a better machine in general and I know the devs want to have a visually-impressive game, but when there's "nothing I can do" to counter that, that kinda takes the enjoyment out of the game quickly. In almost every game you need to see in order to do anything, so how does a frozen image help tell me where to move to avoid death?
And this is kinda spoilery, but I was surprised to hear that the game had ten acts. I'm used to games like these having five. The game used to have the standard "three difficulties you gradually work through" so you'd replay content, but they did away with that a while ago and stuck in five more acts. Turns out this game pulls a Ghouls & Ghosts on you. Get to the end of Act 5, take on the final boss...oh, sorry, that didn't count, go back to the start of the game. The situation is different than in Ghouls & Ghosts considering the stuff you did in prior acts is finally acting on the world and there are more quests and so on, but it still feels kinda off to me. It's new content in old areas in a way and while that's fine for most, it just made me realize how much more of the game I had to play before getting to the actual end. Mind you, I've gone through Act V on Hell in Diablo 2 exactly one time in a modded version, so I'm not really someone who got much mileage out of the "play it three times" system anyway.
Or...or, don’t call me crazy, but I could take their amulets and yours and make three for me.
I'll still recommend the game though. I had a good time until I didn't, and part of it might've honestly been the semi-passive build I had going. I also limited myself quite a bit in terms of player interaction and that's a draw for other people too. And for it being an entirely-free game, I got quite a bit of enjoyment out of it and I'm sure anyone who has interest in the genre would like it, at least once they get over the ridiculously daunting passive tree.
Still kinda nice to zoom in and enjoy the scenery every once in a while.
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Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor
I bought the GOTY edition of Shadow of Mordor through IndieGala for $4.99 a few months ago and only now got around to playing it. It took me around 18 hours and 20 minutes to finish the game with 46% completion. I didn't touch the DLC storylines any so this is really just for the core game itself with whatever minor bonuses the GOTY gives you there. I played with an Xbox 360 controller.
The game opens up with our hero Talion waking in this strange desaturated landscape whereupon he finds the bodies of his family. Then it cuts to a small combat tutorial with his son during better days, and you're later given a stealth tutorial by sneaking up on his wife. It turns out you and your family were all sacrificed to summon the spirit of a long-dead Elf king...and he wound up possessing you. Now you're something of an undead, living and breathing but cursed to never fully die, and this ghost's in your body too. What's a guy like you to do except kick ass all across Mordor in the name of revenge?
I honestly bought Shadow of Mordor on a bit of a whim. I didn't think my computer could actually handle it, but once I finally downloaded it and tried it out, I was amazed at how well it ran. The initial benchmark had me with a scaled-down resolution but the game ran fine at 100% though I of course turned down the visuals. I had some slowdown but even in big battles, I didn't get severe chugging.
Shadow of Mordor is an open-world game. Once you complete the opening sequence, you're largely able to go anywhere and get yourself killed in a variety of ways. Apart from doing the main missions, you can access the Forge Towers around the map to give yourself a Fast Travel anchor and see the many herbs growing in that region, you can free slaves to open Outcast missions to help humans, and you can get into the deadly world of Orc politics. And you can find some artifacts and get snippets of their owner's memories from them, you can do challenge quests to 'forge the legend' of your weapons, and you can do minor survival quests like finding X of Y breed of herbs or kill X many creatures of Y type.
Killing Orcs isn’t one of the challenges...probably.
Combat is split between three methods. You either take on the Orcs in direct combat with your sword, you shoot at them from afar with your bow, or you slit their throats from the shadows with your son's broken sword serving as a dagger. Not to say that you can't enter bullet time with your bow in the fray or shank someone in a group of course. I took Mordor as being a stealthy game and I largely stuck with the bow and dagger. You're able to sprint and still quickly move in stealth, and you can access the 'Wraith World' through your possessor to see Orcs through walls and identify Captains and other points of interest.
But the trade-off is being blind to the rest of the world.
One of the great ways the game really showed off its parkour system was in an early story quest. The idea was to infiltrate an Orc Captain's fortress without having one of his lackeys raise the alarm. I first tried to draw out the two guards at the front and then I got into a big mob and someone called for help. I tried to go around but still hit a big mob. A couple more tries and I decided to scale the wall outside and it turns out Talion can climb almost any surface in the game, especially fortress walls. I got up to the top of the wall and snuck around up there, crossing over on cables and jumping across gaps and so on. Because Orcs rarely look up and you really only have archers up so high, you're kinda encouraged to be Batman. Too bad you can't glide.
im in ur base, sneeking past ur doods
The Orcs have a lot of personality in their idle chatter, but the Captains take this further with their names, titles, strengths, and weaknesses. It's entirely possible to be on your merry way cutting a swath through a group of Orcs and then one of them locks blades with you. "Man-Swine!" And then he introduces himself and you see his name and title. Captains initially are unknown to you but you're able to coerce information out of specific Orcs to learn their identities but also what they're strong and weak to. Going blind into a battle with a Captain can be kinda dicey since you don't know what pisses them off to give them a combat boost and you don't know what they're immune to. Nothing better than singling out the Captain while you're perched above and you go to shoot him... -Immune to Ranged- Shit!
Some Orcs are batshit insane too!
The Nemesis system was kinda neat too, though I didn't really get to make use of it. Orcs that kill you become stronger and get promoted through the Orc hierarchy, and they'll remember fighting you if you died to them or if you didn't finish them off. Orcs also tend to come back from the dead if you dispatched them in any way except a decapitation, usually sporting scars or body modifications related to how you killed them before. My Nemesis ended up being the first Orc to kill me, Bûbol the Humiliator. I tried to be a thorn in his side but my attempts only served to make him stronger (though he didn't kill me again), and I finally got the upper hand on him...only to have him come back during one of the last fights of the game.
Me and My Nemesis. And he still showed up before the second story boss!
Orcs get stronger too on their own, but only when you die and time advances or if you allow time to advance manually, as there's no real-time system in the game. There are feasts and power struggles and tests of might and so on that you can either interfere with or let continue and these cause Orcs to grow in power or die in the process. Killing Captains and Warchiefs grants you your own share of Power and this unlocks the later tiers in the skill tree that the Ranger and Wraith share. You might be able to inflict Critical Hits to speed up how quickly you can bring out your special moves like instant kills or a radial stun, or you can teleport with an arrow to an enemy and knock him down, among other cool powers. Some powers are still locked behind story quests, though...
...like another popular feature, Branding. You initially only have the Drain version of it, where you Force Choke a distant opponent or Shining Finger his face and get back some of your ammo for the bow (it fires arrows made of Orcish agony, clearly), but a quest a bit over halfway through the game gives you the upgrade to force Orcs to fight on your side. You're able to Brand out of stealth or even during combat once you've built up your hit streak, and the Orcs act largely as normal until you activate them, whereupon they turn on their former allies until they die either by their or your hand. And you can even use it on Captains and eventually Warchiefs! One of the things you're encouraged to do is Brand a Warchief's bodyguards so when the time comes to face them in combat, you can instantly turn the tide against them...or send a rival Warchief you've enthralled into combat against them and then spring the bodyguards you turned too. And then Brand the Warchief. Mmm, deviousness.
Your power...is my power now!
Slain Captains and other higher-ups leave Runes behind when they die, and these can be installed on your sword, bow, and dagger, and you can get points to unlock additional rune slots as well as health and Focus upgrades. Runes largely do conditional effects like 46% chance to recover health when you blow up someone's head, or weapons do 26% more damage when attacking from behind, and so on. Some runes are Epic quality and they have unique effects, like slowing down the rate that Focus drains away to being immune to Poison or having a 50% chance to reduce melee damage by 50%. All three of those apparently came with the GOTY DLC, but you're allowed to use up to five per weapon once you open up the slots.
There are some QTEs during gameplay. This is largely tied to the Last Chance feature where you get one chance at escaping death against most Orcs, and it shows up when you try and ride the giant wall-climbing Caragors that roam the landscape or are kept caged up in Orc camps. You're to move the left stick to the center of a circle and press the shown button, though some have you mash a button instead. There are some minor QTEs during plain combat, mostly to show you moves you can counter with Y or moves you can't counter and should dodge with A instead. Apparently you can turn off the counter and dodge signals to make the game a bit harder, but I didn't do that.
I didn’t get a picture of any QTE in action, but when you bring up the Captain’s traits, the game continues to run in slow-motion...even during their agony.
Difficulty-wise, I'd say the game is about easy-medium. I'm still not amazing with stealth games but this one didn't give me too much trouble apart from a few Orcs that had Immune to Ranged or so on. This is something everyone's mileage will vary on, since it's possible to play very poorly and make all of the active Captains very strong. The game auto-saves but I never tried quitting when I was doing poorly. There was one weapon challenge I tried three times that wound up killing me, and while no Orcs were responsible, several of them got stronger due to my sloppy playing. The minimap will highlight Orcs who are within visual range (if not actually see you), and you can straight up run from non-mission encounters. I only found a couple of missions troublesome but the story quests let you retry instead of letting Orcs level-up while you revive.
Even with running the game at low quality, the visuals were still pretty good. I'm really only familiar with Mordor as the barren hellscape from the films, but here it's still somewhat of a rocky plains with several forts built in it, with a second area being astonishingly green and watery. The Orcs have a variety of appearances, though you'll run into some that look like others you've taken on before, and rematches change their appearance based on how you dispatched them before. Also, the game has a camera mode where you can freeze all the action and move the camera around to take screenshots. For some reason, it saved 4MB Targa files to My Documents with every Steam screenshot I took, but I never really looked to see if I could turn that off.
Also, the executions are pretty graphic, especially once you get the Brutalize stealth kill skill.
I really loved the Orc voicework. Everyone had a bit of a Cockney accent and they obviously have the most voicework of anyone in the game. Like other open-world titles, the things they talk about change as you do story quests, and there are several taunts and introductions for the Captains and so on. The music is orchestrated with some chanting, and this really comes up when you face the Warchiefs, since their name is chanted during the battle. And given there are a lot of potential names and that you can promote anyone to Warchief...though this gets a little silly when you meet with an enthralled Warchief to tell him to go beat up someone else because the music still does this. Also, the music when you ride a Caragor is awesome. I otherwise didn't really notice the music but it never got annoying.
Smile for the camera!
It took me a little while to warm up to the game but I largely didn't really have many problems with it. I had some issues with aiming the bow in very tiny increments, to the point where I considered switching to the mouse. Most Orcs die with a fully-charged headshot and that's a tiny window at great range. Sometimes tapping the right stick wouldn't do anything and sometimes my aim veered off wildly. Thankfully it didn't happen but maybe two or three times total. Some of the bosses weren't a problem so much as disappointing. The first real storyline boss? Actually kind of a fun fight since he no-selled some of my common tactics. The second story boss was kinda okay, nothing but forced stealth attacks. The final boss, for all the importance he gets in the story...is fought entirely in a cutscene with QTEs. You do fight a large group of Orcs beforehand but this guy is the big bad! Just a really disappointing end to an otherwise great game.
The game is also kinda huge going by filesize, weighing in at over 44GB which is more than twice the next-biggest game I have installed. It's just how games are going anymore and I imagine Shadow of War is even bigger. The loading times were kinda long since I didn't have room to put it on my SSD, but apart from the initial load, things like fast travel take only a few seconds even on HDD.
And since I never touched on the DLC content, I probably have a couple dozen or so more potential hours to get out of the game yet, but that'll be for another time. I really did enjoy Shadow of Mordor and if you're into brutal Orc slaughter and like the way the Batman Arkham combat system worked, then this might be a good game. Or if you want to play sneaky like I did, it'll work too. You won't be able to do the entire game in the shadows, but it's still nice to target a particularly strong Captain, draw him to an area below you, and then one-shot him with a stealth kill while nobody can stop you.
I effortlessly Brand this guy, only to have a random Caragor one-shot him. Good help is hard to find.
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Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale
Recettear is one of those games I've had forever and a half, probably one of the earliest games I got on Steam in the winter sale many years ago. I figured now was a good time as any to try it out and I managed to play it about thirteen or so hours before calling it quits. I used the Xbox 360 controller for the whole game.
Usually when the bank decides to repossess your house due to debt, you're not given the option to turn it into an item shop to directly pay it off. Young Recette and Tear, the loan shark fairy, team up to sell items to townsfolk and adventurers while slowly chipping away at the debt each week. Meet the quota for the week and you can stay in business. Fail and Recette loses her house for real! But it's okay if you lose--the game will punt you back to Day 2 with all currently-held items and upgrades but no money for you to try again.
Where...were you looking?
Gameplay is split into three parts: You can explore town and manage your shop, you can sell items to customers, and you can hire an adventurer to tackle a dungeon to find items and hopefully not die in the process. There's also a time management aspect to the game. Each day is divided into four wedges and certain actions eat up time. Leaving the shop and coming right back is free, but visiting the locales in town and coming back takes one wedge, while going to the Adventurer's Guild to explore a dungeon takes two. At the end of the day, your items sold, items bought, items found, and money made are counted up and you're given a rating and the next day starts.
There are six areas in town apart from your shop: The Town Square, Chapel, and Bar will occasionally glow indicating there's an event there. Usually these are small story bits where Recette and/or Tear interact with a townsperson. The Market lets you buy 'everyday' items like food, books, and shoes, and you can eventually buy shop customizations like new wallpaper or flooring that affects your store atmosphere, which in turn affects what customers enter your shop. The Merchant's Guild sells mostly weapons and armor for adventurers, and you can use Fusion to combine items into more effective or more valuable forms. You thankfully don't need to find recipes but unknown components will stay a mystery until you find or buy the right item.
The monsters are prerendered 3D sprites but at least one boss is an actual 3D model. They really stand out from the spritework that compose the heroes.
The Adventurer's Guild is where all the dungeon crawling happens. While Recette and Tear are present, they're functionally ghosts since they can't interact with the monsters or be hurt by them and you instead control the hired adventurer directly. Pay a fee and they're yours for the trek until they get killed or until you decide to leave. Exploration is pretty Zelda-like and the first adventurer you get plays almost like Link does even! Maps are randomly put together and there are enemies scattered about as well as chests, traps, and the exit to the next floor. Every few floors you face a boss and are given the option to press on or exit. You have a small carrying capacity but this is where many Fusion components are found, but if your adventurer falls, you're only able to take back one item at all as a consolation prize. There are several hireables but they're not handed to you.
Set up items in your shop and open up and people will start coming in. It's time to haggle! People will come to you with an item on display and you have to give them the price. Instead of putting price tags on everything as you display them, you instead set the price right when someone offers to buy it. You're given the item's base price to start and you adjust the numbers, also being told at what percentage of the base price you're selling it at. Obviously you want to sell for more than 100% of the item's value, but you don't want to set it too high since everyone has a general idea of an item's value and also only so much money on-hand. You're given two chances to sell an item before the customer gives up, unless your first quote was outright offensive. The game doesn't really give you an idea how many people will try to buy something each time you open, but at the end of this phase, you return to store prep and can hit the town or open right back up.
You can’t expect someone to buy your junk for tens of millions of pix, I guess.
Recette has her own EXP bar. Selling items grants a small amount of EXP regardless, but selling items on the first try to consecutive customers grants a chain bonus, and there’s another bonus for getting close and very close to what the customer thinks the item’s actually worth. Leveling up unlocks content like having customers sell items to you, or lets you use bought customizations for tables and walls and the floor, as well as expanding the bag space for adventuring or letting you bring back slightly more items if you fail there.
There are also small events that are displayed at the top of the screen during the store prep phase that change the value of items or notify you about a rising interest in a certain category. For example, the harvest can be a failure and that sends the price of all food-class items up and their names turn red/pink. It costs more for you to buy these items but you can charge a lot more for them. Or the opposite happens and the value of armor goes down for example, then all armor-class items will have blue names and you buy/sell them for less. I didn't have this happen but if you really flooded the market with a single type of item, you could get its price to crash and turn their names black, tanking the value hard. Yikes.
“Is it wrong to make money off of desperate townsfolk after the harvest disaster? ... Yay, money!”
There are these events in the dungeons too, like enemies dealing double damage, you gaining double EXP, and so on. These only apply for the current floor and not every floor triggers a modifier.
So this is a cutesy shopkeeping game cross dungeon crawler. Why am I not recommending it? I just didn't really enjoy it. Yeah it's cute and it's charming but I didn't have fun on the ride. I haven't really played a game like it but it still didn't do much for me. Buying and selling items to customers isn't really exciting. I wound up sticking with selling at around 120% and buying at 70% and that worked for the most part. Dungeon crawling was all right but it's kinda basic, and it had its own share of headaches. Like Recette constantly asking if you're okay when you get hurt, even if it was a minor loss of HP. It doesn't happen every time you get hurt but you'll be hearing the same two lines a lot and that really grated my nerves.
At least the localization is done really well.
Equipping adventurers is kinda weird too. You can take items with you to equip when you arrive, but then the items the adventurer was wearing already are stuck in your inventory and because they're just borrowing your better gear, you can't dump their possessions. You instead have to set up your store to attract the adventurer, place items you hope they look at, and hope that someone else doesn't buy it before they do. If not, well, you're not going to be carrying as much out of the dungeon. Not a big issue for most but you're kinda supposed to bring back as many valuable items given the time cost for dungeoning. You don't find money in there, and the quality of items seems to vary quite a bit. Enemies drop food and Fusion material, but some recipes call for a ridiculous number of materials and the result may not even be worth the time spent. You could end up with a really valuable item...only for nobody to buy it even if it's in your showcase.
A lot of the game's story is locked in the dungeons as are all of the other adventurers, so if you're trying to play efficiently, you're not going to see most of it. From what I looked up, there's not a sweeping epic tale, but you'd never know it unless you spent time you may not be able to afford smacking monsters around and looting chests.
I didn't really like that the game seems built around the idea of the extra loops if you fail to make a payment. There are some people who have finished all 35 days without game overing once, but then you have to play really efficiently, like not visiting the dungeon when you instead could be just selling more stuff you bought before, or never watching the little scenes in town because you could just be selling. Some of the items that alter your store atmosphere are extremely expensive and you're never told in what way they change the atmosphere--the same way you're not told how items influence it either. I hope you like saving and loading. Or just looking at a guide.
What do you mean I spent all of the money to get the most things for the second go?! Should I ever return anyway.
It's probably not a bad game for some and I'm sure it does deserve its Overwhelming Positive rating on Steam, but I just didn't enjoy it. And that sucks because despite me putting it off for so long, I was really looking forward to it too.
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