Legolas_Katarn
BACKER
Update to a classic Saturn rail shooter that looks decent for an update to an old title and keeps the same level design but loses the otherworldly feel of the original, has a lack of extras, and a poorly handled "modern" control scheme that is disabled by default.
The game plays like a normal flight rail shooter where you move a reticle around to target enemies and your dragon moves in the direction you are aiming to avoid the obstacles or shots that you can't shoot down. You can rapidly push multiple fire buttons for a very fast rate of fire that can be good for more damage on one target or to shoot down enemy shots, or you can hold the button while you scroll over targets for an auto lock laser shot that fires at its targets when you let go. You can rotate the camera your view to the left, right, and behind you where your dragon will lose it's maneuverability while it allows you to deal with threats from those angles. A radar identifies which side enemies are on by showing them in yellow and can show more active attackers in red. For an update of an old game it looks good and mostly stays in line with the style of the old by just greatly expanding on what was already there and removing the frequent obstacle and texture pop in of the Saturn title, the gain of clarity and having a much wider, brighter, and detailed environment does make the game lose the otherworldly feel of the original game though. The soundtrack is good and there are some enemies and moments that make use of the ability to shift facing in a way that is interesting compared to a lot of other rail shooter.
It is a very short and easy game, setting it to medium difficulty I beat it in under an hour without ever losing a life and shooting down about 95-99% of enemies on each level and I believe dying would have just used one of the 11 or so continues I ended up with that could put me right back at a boss fight. The modern control style when used will allow you to aim and move separately from one another, which should be a less awkward way to control the dragon and make the game even easier but the severe decrease in movement speed and for some reason the choice in turning off the ability to rapid fire your weapon by quickly hitting multiple fire buttons make it both a poor choice and not really how the game was designed. As you aren't flying a ship but riding a dragon the original way also makes it feel more like you are attempting to guide the dragons movement rather than just flying a ship that reacts in the exact way you want it to. Beating the game unlocks a few minor options like a stage select, god mode, most helpfully a rapid fire button option where one of your fire buttons can just be held down to shoot quickly saving the need to quickly mash them. Nothing that will change the game in a way to make it last longer though or make new playthroughs any more interesting.
For a likely quickly done remake of what seems to usually be considered the worst and most basic game in the four game series it's a fine playthrough but it's not going to be as interesting as it was on release and hard to justify buying at the full $25 price.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1688379991950766080
The game plays like a normal flight rail shooter where you move a reticle around to target enemies and your dragon moves in the direction you are aiming to avoid the obstacles or shots that you can't shoot down. You can rapidly push multiple fire buttons for a very fast rate of fire that can be good for more damage on one target or to shoot down enemy shots, or you can hold the button while you scroll over targets for an auto lock laser shot that fires at its targets when you let go. You can rotate the camera your view to the left, right, and behind you where your dragon will lose it's maneuverability while it allows you to deal with threats from those angles. A radar identifies which side enemies are on by showing them in yellow and can show more active attackers in red. For an update of an old game it looks good and mostly stays in line with the style of the old by just greatly expanding on what was already there and removing the frequent obstacle and texture pop in of the Saturn title, the gain of clarity and having a much wider, brighter, and detailed environment does make the game lose the otherworldly feel of the original game though. The soundtrack is good and there are some enemies and moments that make use of the ability to shift facing in a way that is interesting compared to a lot of other rail shooter.
It is a very short and easy game, setting it to medium difficulty I beat it in under an hour without ever losing a life and shooting down about 95-99% of enemies on each level and I believe dying would have just used one of the 11 or so continues I ended up with that could put me right back at a boss fight. The modern control style when used will allow you to aim and move separately from one another, which should be a less awkward way to control the dragon and make the game even easier but the severe decrease in movement speed and for some reason the choice in turning off the ability to rapid fire your weapon by quickly hitting multiple fire buttons make it both a poor choice and not really how the game was designed. As you aren't flying a ship but riding a dragon the original way also makes it feel more like you are attempting to guide the dragons movement rather than just flying a ship that reacts in the exact way you want it to. Beating the game unlocks a few minor options like a stage select, god mode, most helpfully a rapid fire button option where one of your fire buttons can just be held down to shoot quickly saving the need to quickly mash them. Nothing that will change the game in a way to make it last longer though or make new playthroughs any more interesting.
For a likely quickly done remake of what seems to usually be considered the worst and most basic game in the four game series it's a fine playthrough but it's not going to be as interesting as it was on release and hard to justify buying at the full $25 price.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1688379991950766080
2022
A simple and enjoyable game system with a well written and interesting setting, but a lack of real threat and waiting can hurt the pace and ability to do and to excel at everything with lack of consequence can hurt the themes.
Citizen Sleeper combines a tabletop RPG style system with visual novel aesthetics that has some minor survival elements. You play as an escaped Sleeper, a sentient robot body with a mind emulated from a scan taken from a live human body. Your rights to be seen as a human signed away, memories of your life as a human fragmented, and the Essen-Arp corporation views your body as their property and wants you back and if they can't get you back your lack of access to the supplements now required by you will see you drained of power soon enough. You and many other Sleepers attempt to escape your poor treatment by stuffing themselves into cargo container, the one you were in landing on the run down and partly lawless space station of Erlin's Eye.
You have a choice in character creation where you will start with a negative one when using one of the five skills but a positive one in another skill, as well as a passive perk associated with your positive skill. Every day will be given 1-5 dice that are rolled on the start of each day valuing from 1-6. Attempting to complete tasks will either require you to assign an item or money or to assign one of your dice to a challenge, any positive modifiers based on your skills (from -1 to +2) will be added to the die and that will decide on your percentage chance of positive, neutral (a weaker success or a success with additional bad effects), or negative results. The number of dice your receive each day is based on your current condition level that will drain each time you sleep or if you are damaged in some way, finding or buying food is also necessary as reaching a low enough energy state will cause you to lose additional condition each day. Exploring the setting is a large part of the game as meeting certain characters, traveling and opening up new paths on the station, and performing tasks like asking for directions or searching a new location will unlock new points of interest. Your skills are Engineer (fixing mechanical devices), Interface (hacking and remotely controlling things), Endure (withstanding harsher conditions or repetitive labor), Intuit (awareness and consideration of problems), and Engage (more direct and physical solutions to problems) and their associated passive skills will allow you to more easily manage your decaying condition, haggle better when spending money, reroll your daily dice rolls once a day, etc.
Your goal is going to be to get yourself to a point where you become self sufficient enough to manage your condition and energy needs while also being able to complete the game's tasks and quests (called drives). When a drive is complete you will gain an upgrade point which can be used to increase your five skills enough to get up to a +2 in rolls associated with them and each skills two passive perks. You might decide a life on the station is freedom enough for you going through all the tasks you can while living day to day, especially if you have been making friends, working to improve the place, and feeding a stray cat each night, or you might find people that you can travel off of the station with or an entirely different way to leave your current existence behind. Deciding if the life you've managed to build is enough or if surviving day to day isn't as interesting as the possibility to find something more is a large part of each of the game's endings (choosing to leave will allow you to then reload your save right before you left so you can instead choose to stay allowing you to continue with your other goals without needing to go through the entire game again, also nice since the free DLC requires you to be on the station).
It's a simple and enjoyable game system, very well written, a nice art style, and gives an interesting setting to explore but a lack of real threat and waiting for things to happen can hurt the pacing. When you start the game your failing condition is a threat, you don't know what's going on at the station, events are constantly happening, and there seem to be more branching paths to minor events as even one of your first jobs can take a more negative route for your relationship with the first person you meet if you keep failing or putting work off with the limited starting dice you have. What will soon happen though is that you will get to a point where money is no longer an issue and fully repairing your condition and raising your energy is also easily taken care of once you have more locations unlocked, with those threats gone you will also frequently have multiple events where you are either waiting a few days for timers to run out so they can continue or you will just slowly pick away at the ones you want to do first as almost none of the events have any kind of real time or failure state.
Early on you learn you have a tracker installed on you and someone is coming to the station to find you, this would get you to think you might die or have some large penalty if that happens. Instead it has to happen, you meet a bounty hunter who ends up letting you stay if you pay the bar tab he runs up over the next week, and if you don't pay the tab he will just show up to steal all your money with no penalty if it was less than what the tab was anyway. The events and the characters you meet through that situation are all written well and enjoyable to go through but the constant ability to do everything in the game and to never be in any real danger seems to be a bit at odds with the feel and themes of the game. Nearing the end you can even come close to maxing out every single skill so it's not even a game where you are forced to specialize for certain tasks in a particular playthrough, there are a couple tasks that you can't do without having a +1 in the skill but by the time you reach them that's not much of an issue. On the other hand, there are multiple people having tantrums about their inability to complete the first part of the DLC successfully in the 12 or so days the event gives them after they start it, and as I completed the event without really trying (because, even though you are locked to one save, you can definitely make use quits to the main menu before the auto save triggers on skill checks or dice rerolls) of in six days I suppose I can't really say what in the world other people do in games like this to cause themselves so many problems.
It's a great game, just a little odd and feels a bit against message when technically in one playthrough your character is a savant in all areas, is basically every factions friend and the friend of an AI now influencing major station systems, inherits a ship repair business, improves the food quality of the station, joins a commune but also has three other places to live, etc, etc, etc. Is the daily grind of life enough is an easier question to answer when you are rolling in money, friends, and allies.
Screenshots:
Citizen Sleeper combines a tabletop RPG style system with visual novel aesthetics that has some minor survival elements. You play as an escaped Sleeper, a sentient robot body with a mind emulated from a scan taken from a live human body. Your rights to be seen as a human signed away, memories of your life as a human fragmented, and the Essen-Arp corporation views your body as their property and wants you back and if they can't get you back your lack of access to the supplements now required by you will see you drained of power soon enough. You and many other Sleepers attempt to escape your poor treatment by stuffing themselves into cargo container, the one you were in landing on the run down and partly lawless space station of Erlin's Eye.
You have a choice in character creation where you will start with a negative one when using one of the five skills but a positive one in another skill, as well as a passive perk associated with your positive skill. Every day will be given 1-5 dice that are rolled on the start of each day valuing from 1-6. Attempting to complete tasks will either require you to assign an item or money or to assign one of your dice to a challenge, any positive modifiers based on your skills (from -1 to +2) will be added to the die and that will decide on your percentage chance of positive, neutral (a weaker success or a success with additional bad effects), or negative results. The number of dice your receive each day is based on your current condition level that will drain each time you sleep or if you are damaged in some way, finding or buying food is also necessary as reaching a low enough energy state will cause you to lose additional condition each day. Exploring the setting is a large part of the game as meeting certain characters, traveling and opening up new paths on the station, and performing tasks like asking for directions or searching a new location will unlock new points of interest. Your skills are Engineer (fixing mechanical devices), Interface (hacking and remotely controlling things), Endure (withstanding harsher conditions or repetitive labor), Intuit (awareness and consideration of problems), and Engage (more direct and physical solutions to problems) and their associated passive skills will allow you to more easily manage your decaying condition, haggle better when spending money, reroll your daily dice rolls once a day, etc.
Your goal is going to be to get yourself to a point where you become self sufficient enough to manage your condition and energy needs while also being able to complete the game's tasks and quests (called drives). When a drive is complete you will gain an upgrade point which can be used to increase your five skills enough to get up to a +2 in rolls associated with them and each skills two passive perks. You might decide a life on the station is freedom enough for you going through all the tasks you can while living day to day, especially if you have been making friends, working to improve the place, and feeding a stray cat each night, or you might find people that you can travel off of the station with or an entirely different way to leave your current existence behind. Deciding if the life you've managed to build is enough or if surviving day to day isn't as interesting as the possibility to find something more is a large part of each of the game's endings (choosing to leave will allow you to then reload your save right before you left so you can instead choose to stay allowing you to continue with your other goals without needing to go through the entire game again, also nice since the free DLC requires you to be on the station).
It's a simple and enjoyable game system, very well written, a nice art style, and gives an interesting setting to explore but a lack of real threat and waiting for things to happen can hurt the pacing. When you start the game your failing condition is a threat, you don't know what's going on at the station, events are constantly happening, and there seem to be more branching paths to minor events as even one of your first jobs can take a more negative route for your relationship with the first person you meet if you keep failing or putting work off with the limited starting dice you have. What will soon happen though is that you will get to a point where money is no longer an issue and fully repairing your condition and raising your energy is also easily taken care of once you have more locations unlocked, with those threats gone you will also frequently have multiple events where you are either waiting a few days for timers to run out so they can continue or you will just slowly pick away at the ones you want to do first as almost none of the events have any kind of real time or failure state.
Early on you learn you have a tracker installed on you and someone is coming to the station to find you, this would get you to think you might die or have some large penalty if that happens. Instead it has to happen, you meet a bounty hunter who ends up letting you stay if you pay the bar tab he runs up over the next week, and if you don't pay the tab he will just show up to steal all your money with no penalty if it was less than what the tab was anyway. The events and the characters you meet through that situation are all written well and enjoyable to go through but the constant ability to do everything in the game and to never be in any real danger seems to be a bit at odds with the feel and themes of the game. Nearing the end you can even come close to maxing out every single skill so it's not even a game where you are forced to specialize for certain tasks in a particular playthrough, there are a couple tasks that you can't do without having a +1 in the skill but by the time you reach them that's not much of an issue. On the other hand, there are multiple people having tantrums about their inability to complete the first part of the DLC successfully in the 12 or so days the event gives them after they start it, and as I completed the event without really trying (because, even though you are locked to one save, you can definitely make use quits to the main menu before the auto save triggers on skill checks or dice rerolls) of in six days I suppose I can't really say what in the world other people do in games like this to cause themselves so many problems.
It's a great game, just a little odd and feels a bit against message when technically in one playthrough your character is a savant in all areas, is basically every factions friend and the friend of an AI now influencing major station systems, inherits a ship repair business, improves the food quality of the station, joins a commune but also has three other places to live, etc, etc, etc. Is the daily grind of life enough is an easier question to answer when you are rolling in money, friends, and allies.
Screenshots:
A turn based RPG built around having a card and tabletop roleplaying aesthetic for visuals and narrative, neither of which it takes advantage of. Leaving it a short, overpriced, mostly mediocre RPG.
The visuals of the game are based around cards, this includes the menus, the characters and enemies, the map and dungeons you move around on are cards that flip over to reveal terrain as you move, during battles your equipped skills show up as cards with art and their description on them. As a game styled around a tabletop RPG, the story, events, character dialogue, and sometimes just descriptions or hints as you explore are narrated by an out of sight game master.
At a glance I would have assumed I would have enjoyed the game quite a bit because of how much I like those two things but it ended up being a fairly dull playthrough that takes advantage of neither of the elements the game is built around. With the fairly ridiculously high price of the game (as well as needless cosmetic DLC), especially with all the indies that have done much more interesting GM and/or card focused RPG games, they could certainly have gone further at making the card aesthetic a lot more visually interesting with less generic tiles you move on, the monsters you fight and your character skills could have had cool looking detailed artwork like you would get out of something like Magic/Lord of the Rings LCG/Netrunner/etc instead of just a generic small variety of monsters just drawn in a rectangle or weapon and element symbol with text of what skills do, the characters could have been drawn onto cards in different ways or on not just generic blank backgrounds to show emotion and be more visually interesting. What could have been a much more interesting world to explore ends up being fairly generic. The style actually lead them to having some other issues. Everything is a bit slower than it should be and the odd card style of the menus make them slow and more of a chore to navigate than they should be, even lacking basic functions like cycling through characters with the shoulder or trigger buttons when you are swapping out equipment (it all functions even worse with a mouse and keyboard). I used no combat items in the game until the final battle but for some odd reason instead of limiting the max number of certain kinds of items you can hold they give you an inventory limit of 30 total items. This lead to a lot moments in the last 1/3 of the game where I would find a chest and be given a useless item or finish a battle and be rewarded with a useless item that would then slowly bring up a text about having too many items before slowly taking me to a screen where I can slowly choose one item to throw away before being allowed to move on.
The GM narration focus is also a thing that really doesn't go anywhere. He's just kind of there to only need to pay one voice actor and for some reason to give away any hints when a dungeon does anything different (dungeon has walls that turn into doors when you move onto them, "Why don't you try moving there"). The entire Game Master thing is never really used to add anything to the world and ends up just taking away from it, even more so because the added assumption of having a GM would be that the characters would have their own players but it's just the GM narrating what few inner thoughts or actions they take.
What you end up being left with is a short, overpriced, and mostly mediocre RPG. What little story there is can have a few moments of humor but doesn't offer much for world or character building. Every town will have the same shops and a couple people to talk to, you can explore three larger landmasses near towns to find the dungeons or other towns you need to go to or to run into often repeating random events. There is never really anything interesting to the design of dungeons, the biggest thing they do is put some spikes in some tiles right before you reach the end boss that you just don't want to step on to avoid taking any damage (these spikes are clearly visible, though one of the character's best weapons does require you to just walk through a couple spikes to reveal a chest a few spaces in). There are no route deviations or big side quests as it is a primarily linear game, you can get four choices for your ending that will amount to a few lines before the credits roll.
Most of your time playing will be taking a few steps, getting into a random battle, and completely destroying those enemies (over and over and over again because the low enemy variety doesn't help things). If you remember to upgrade your equipment at new shops, 80% of battles will be over before enemies can even get an attack off. With an ice attack spell that can freeze enemies permanently and causes you to break them out of the ice but do double damage when you hit them, even the first couple bosses didn't get to attack me. You start off with a party of three characters and get two more characters to join you over time, one coming fairly late but you have a limitation I've never been a fan of of only being able to use three characters at once but then two of the characters seem more focused on buffing or having some defensive skills and this is a game where healing and buffing has no use 99% of the time. At least this is one of the games that doesn't make the mistake of older titles and the characters in reserve still gain full XP from battles. As characters level up and change their equipment they can add to their health, attack (which influences all skills be they melee, ranged, or magic), defense, and speed and gain access to a few passive skills they always have (mostly element or status effect resistance), and active skills of which they can equip four of. In battle your skills are powered by crystals, you start a battle with one and gain another at the start of every character's turn. A basic attack costs nothing but using more powerful or status effecting skills can cost between 1-4, so you will want use your heavier hitting skills or skills that enemies are weak to while focusing on basic attacks or turn passive to help prepare stronger attacks.
While the battle system works and can be simple and enjoyable at times, the AI is terrible. In addition to all those times where enemies just couldn't do anything there will be so many times where when they do get to act they will try to do something like buff itself as it is near death and all of your characters move next. You will frequently see an enemy use a turn to slightly debuff one characters defense or elemental defense, often to a degree less than what their hit damage would have done only to then have their other allies attack other non debuffed characters. One positive here is that even with the battles taking place with the card visual style the attack animations do have varied effects for every type of skill and additional critical hit they can do while moving the cards around, making it a bit more visually interesting than the what you would get with the old first person kind of Dragon Quest/Wizardry battles that the animations would resemble otherwise.
It's a simple and fairly quick play (taking me about 9 hours) with a few funny moments but with all the good ideas aesthetically and mechanically or ideas that can be used in a much more interesting way it doesn't take advantage of anything and when it is selling for $30-$40+ there are a lot of other games with some similar themes that are worth more, cost less, and support an indie studio.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1686640421357985792
The visuals of the game are based around cards, this includes the menus, the characters and enemies, the map and dungeons you move around on are cards that flip over to reveal terrain as you move, during battles your equipped skills show up as cards with art and their description on them. As a game styled around a tabletop RPG, the story, events, character dialogue, and sometimes just descriptions or hints as you explore are narrated by an out of sight game master.
At a glance I would have assumed I would have enjoyed the game quite a bit because of how much I like those two things but it ended up being a fairly dull playthrough that takes advantage of neither of the elements the game is built around. With the fairly ridiculously high price of the game (as well as needless cosmetic DLC), especially with all the indies that have done much more interesting GM and/or card focused RPG games, they could certainly have gone further at making the card aesthetic a lot more visually interesting with less generic tiles you move on, the monsters you fight and your character skills could have had cool looking detailed artwork like you would get out of something like Magic/Lord of the Rings LCG/Netrunner/etc instead of just a generic small variety of monsters just drawn in a rectangle or weapon and element symbol with text of what skills do, the characters could have been drawn onto cards in different ways or on not just generic blank backgrounds to show emotion and be more visually interesting. What could have been a much more interesting world to explore ends up being fairly generic. The style actually lead them to having some other issues. Everything is a bit slower than it should be and the odd card style of the menus make them slow and more of a chore to navigate than they should be, even lacking basic functions like cycling through characters with the shoulder or trigger buttons when you are swapping out equipment (it all functions even worse with a mouse and keyboard). I used no combat items in the game until the final battle but for some odd reason instead of limiting the max number of certain kinds of items you can hold they give you an inventory limit of 30 total items. This lead to a lot moments in the last 1/3 of the game where I would find a chest and be given a useless item or finish a battle and be rewarded with a useless item that would then slowly bring up a text about having too many items before slowly taking me to a screen where I can slowly choose one item to throw away before being allowed to move on.
The GM narration focus is also a thing that really doesn't go anywhere. He's just kind of there to only need to pay one voice actor and for some reason to give away any hints when a dungeon does anything different (dungeon has walls that turn into doors when you move onto them, "Why don't you try moving there"). The entire Game Master thing is never really used to add anything to the world and ends up just taking away from it, even more so because the added assumption of having a GM would be that the characters would have their own players but it's just the GM narrating what few inner thoughts or actions they take.
What you end up being left with is a short, overpriced, and mostly mediocre RPG. What little story there is can have a few moments of humor but doesn't offer much for world or character building. Every town will have the same shops and a couple people to talk to, you can explore three larger landmasses near towns to find the dungeons or other towns you need to go to or to run into often repeating random events. There is never really anything interesting to the design of dungeons, the biggest thing they do is put some spikes in some tiles right before you reach the end boss that you just don't want to step on to avoid taking any damage (these spikes are clearly visible, though one of the character's best weapons does require you to just walk through a couple spikes to reveal a chest a few spaces in). There are no route deviations or big side quests as it is a primarily linear game, you can get four choices for your ending that will amount to a few lines before the credits roll.
Most of your time playing will be taking a few steps, getting into a random battle, and completely destroying those enemies (over and over and over again because the low enemy variety doesn't help things). If you remember to upgrade your equipment at new shops, 80% of battles will be over before enemies can even get an attack off. With an ice attack spell that can freeze enemies permanently and causes you to break them out of the ice but do double damage when you hit them, even the first couple bosses didn't get to attack me. You start off with a party of three characters and get two more characters to join you over time, one coming fairly late but you have a limitation I've never been a fan of of only being able to use three characters at once but then two of the characters seem more focused on buffing or having some defensive skills and this is a game where healing and buffing has no use 99% of the time. At least this is one of the games that doesn't make the mistake of older titles and the characters in reserve still gain full XP from battles. As characters level up and change their equipment they can add to their health, attack (which influences all skills be they melee, ranged, or magic), defense, and speed and gain access to a few passive skills they always have (mostly element or status effect resistance), and active skills of which they can equip four of. In battle your skills are powered by crystals, you start a battle with one and gain another at the start of every character's turn. A basic attack costs nothing but using more powerful or status effecting skills can cost between 1-4, so you will want use your heavier hitting skills or skills that enemies are weak to while focusing on basic attacks or turn passive to help prepare stronger attacks.
While the battle system works and can be simple and enjoyable at times, the AI is terrible. In addition to all those times where enemies just couldn't do anything there will be so many times where when they do get to act they will try to do something like buff itself as it is near death and all of your characters move next. You will frequently see an enemy use a turn to slightly debuff one characters defense or elemental defense, often to a degree less than what their hit damage would have done only to then have their other allies attack other non debuffed characters. One positive here is that even with the battles taking place with the card visual style the attack animations do have varied effects for every type of skill and additional critical hit they can do while moving the cards around, making it a bit more visually interesting than the what you would get with the old first person kind of Dragon Quest/Wizardry battles that the animations would resemble otherwise.
It's a simple and fairly quick play (taking me about 9 hours) with a few funny moments but with all the good ideas aesthetically and mechanically or ideas that can be used in a much more interesting way it doesn't take advantage of anything and when it is selling for $30-$40+ there are a lot of other games with some similar themes that are worth more, cost less, and support an indie studio.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1686640421357985792
2023
Fun combat with varied characters and great looking models and animations, but loses the personality from growing characters and your town over time and replaces that growth with busywork and a surprising lack of content for a sequel.
Darkest Dungeon 2 changes up the formula of the previous game, instead of upgrading a town and a roster of characters over time while sending them on short excursions to explorable dungeons, you know choose a party of four characters that traverse different locations in a stagecoach fighting or interacting with events as you choose route directions with upcoming obstacles possibly revealed through random scouting chances when you enter a map or by finding watchtowers or scouting through an event. Instead of the short dungeon trips that you can finish, retreat, or get everyone killed in broken up by upgrading your town to improve characters, items, and healing and sanity regeneration you now have a much longer run as you attempt to manage your groups sanity and relationships by choosing random events that hopefully raise character affinity to one another, attempting to land on hospital locations to remove negative character traits or diseases, and you will attempt to kill at least one location boss in each run by fighting through the boss lair to collect a trophy from that boss. The goal of each run is to travel through a set number of locations, with inns that offer healing, sanity restoration, skill training, and item sales between each location, before you get to the final mountain location which requires a boss trophy to enter. At the end of the mountain is one of five bosses depending on the current confession choice you have selected before each run.
Combat is still very similar to the previous game and is fun, has some great animation, and narrated with some well done and entertaining voicework. Your party members each have five equipped skills with each skill able to be used in certain positions in the formation and can be used to target allies under certain conditions or enemies that are standing at a targetable spot in their formation. Your skills can inflict a mixture of damage, critical hits, heals, sanity restoration, stuns, knockbacks, pulls, burn damage over time, blight damage over time, dodge chance, armor to cut a percentage of damage, shields that have one character taking damage in place of an ally, bleed damage over time, set other characters up for additional skill effects, etc. Between each fight while traveling to the next event you can access the skill screen where you can swap out which five of a character's 11 skills will be active in the next battle, change your formation, and you can equip each character with two trinkets and one item they can use in combat. The ability to use items as a free action in combat, varied trinkets with some being made for certain characters, and each character now having a generic or three sub class types that makes certain abilities or resistances they have better or worse there is some good variety when it comes to party composition. Although a few of the subclasses can be a bit questionable in terms of viability or are clearly going to be worse than other options unless you are just wanting to mess around.
Character sanity levels have to be managed as well. Taking a critical hit or damage from certain types of attacks can raise their sanity meter from 1-10. Once you are around four you have a high chance during travel that someone's bad mood might worsen relationships or have negative effects, but in battle hitting the max of 10 will cause either a meltdown where they lose significant health and lower their relationship with allies or a small chance to become resolute where they will empty their sanity meter and heal themselves. Character relationships are raised or lowered through random event choices, random positive or negative effects during travel, item use in inns, and occasional based on actions taken in battles. Lower relationships give a chance for negative effects between two characters to take effect while higher levels give a chance to gain positive effects whenever you leave an inn. These relationship effects cause characters to give positive or negative effects to allies when certain skills are used or can have their friends jump in to buff, attack with them, or defend them in some way.
For the most part the game works fine except for a few issues people that liked the previous game or who would prefer that system might have. You are stuck with the same party (unless someone dies then a new character for each death can be randomly selected at an inn, which is potentially its own problem given some party compositions now working well), you are much more effected by bad luck or lack of area knowledge due to the much lengthier runs, the only thing you can carry over for a character is if they survive a run and you use them again they will keep the same positive and negative quirks and any disease they had by the end your skill training, relationships, and items are all reset.
The biggest issues with the game are the lack of content and busywork built into the design. Each location has one boss, a few repeated enemy types, and each of the five confession choices do little to influence the game other than possibly changing how many locations you need to go through, what kind of buffs certain types of enemies use, and the final boss. Some characters certainly feel a bit stronger than others but they all have their own feel to them and are well animated, but there are less characters than in the previous game and the Bounty Hunter has now been relegated to being a random chance party add you can find at an inn that has to replace one of your other characters for one location. When it comes to busywork you now have to find shrines during runs in order to unlock the majority of skills for each character. Each character starts with five unlocked skills and unlocks the other six by going through five events at these shrines, most of these are text/narration based that give you more insight into a character's past but a few will have a little objective based battle you engage in as their past self. A cool way to give more personality to characters and something that can come into play for them during the final boss battle with the last confession, but you might need to make 2-3 full runs per character to unlock all of their skills and many locked skills are things that are needed for a character to be useful. The game is significantly harder when characters lack their basic skills, especially when some parties just don't even have the ability to deal with certain threats without these options. This amounts to hours and hours of time to get these skills unlocked and as just an obvious bad design choice it means that when you see these shrines scouted you are almost certainly going to go for it no matter how bad of a route choice it might be as you ignore a part of the game just to get this over with.
The town upgrading over time has been replaced by a series of shrines you access before a run where you spend candles to unlock things, candles are gained from completing objectives or finding them in runs or by doing a character tasks that they have on each run (often killing a type of enemy or using an ability so many times in one battle). These unlocks are passive upgrades like unlocking other characters for use, increasing character resistances, unlocking subclasses, bonuses to your stagecoach that can include better scouting or ability to carry more items or find more candles, and you can use candles to unlock a wider variety of items that you can find in your runs, passive items that can make the game easier or harder like pets you or different types of flames you can add to the stagecoach, etc. At its best, you are spending time to basically just unlock basic game mechanics or to make things functional in the same way you do by unlocking character skills, and at worst once you have what you want the entire candle system just become almost pointless for the rest of the time you plan to play the game. On a positive note, a lot of games that have you unlocking a lot of items you can find in roguelite runs over is adding things to the world that are either nearly useless in general or nearly useless for many playstyles and while you can see items you will likely have little use for I tended to just notice more wider varieties of similar item types rather than a complete lack of things I need that have been replaced with more and more garbage over time. An odd oversight seems to be that you also start a run with the random items you have unlocked since your previous run so that added element could have given some minor use to the candles you will get at the end of each run but once you have unlocked everything it no longer allows you to spend candles on random items. It is also kind of unfortunate that, while you unlock some cosmetic character changes that alter weapons or colors, you can't unlock their past looks that characters have during their shrine events, it's also a minor annoyance that you can't save skill and subclass settings and that you need to reselect everything for each new run.
The randomness of the design can also lead to some unfortunate occurrences like just not having items you want appearing for sale, constant repeated types of events you are trying to avoid, characters wanting to do things during events that upset other characters (and probably don't often make mechanical sense or sense for the personality shown by them during their shrine events) or just don't make sense like wanting to get scouting information when you already have the map filled or are at the end of it or wanting to fix stagecoach armor or wheels when both are already at their highest condition.
It's a fun game but if you are trying to complete each of the character skill sets and get through every confession you are going to be seeing the same content over and over and over and it's a shame they didn't give much personality to characters when it comes to their interactions with each other since they took a route where each one is now their own unique person with their own past they you see. With future plans to add new enemies, bosses, and characters to the game more of the needed variety to your runs should be given as the game continues to grow.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1685793792908275713
Videos
Darkest Dungeon II - Seething Sigh Resentment Boss Battle: https://youtu.be/c7qMjAZjqQw
Darkest Dungeon 2 - Focused Fault Obsession Boss Battle (1.0 version of boss): https://youtu.be/fSk4bX5VW3I
Darkest Dungeon 2 - Ravenous Reach Ambition Boss Battle: https://youtu.be/YB6zVYO41Vo
Darkest Dungeon 2 changes up the formula of the previous game, instead of upgrading a town and a roster of characters over time while sending them on short excursions to explorable dungeons, you know choose a party of four characters that traverse different locations in a stagecoach fighting or interacting with events as you choose route directions with upcoming obstacles possibly revealed through random scouting chances when you enter a map or by finding watchtowers or scouting through an event. Instead of the short dungeon trips that you can finish, retreat, or get everyone killed in broken up by upgrading your town to improve characters, items, and healing and sanity regeneration you now have a much longer run as you attempt to manage your groups sanity and relationships by choosing random events that hopefully raise character affinity to one another, attempting to land on hospital locations to remove negative character traits or diseases, and you will attempt to kill at least one location boss in each run by fighting through the boss lair to collect a trophy from that boss. The goal of each run is to travel through a set number of locations, with inns that offer healing, sanity restoration, skill training, and item sales between each location, before you get to the final mountain location which requires a boss trophy to enter. At the end of the mountain is one of five bosses depending on the current confession choice you have selected before each run.
Combat is still very similar to the previous game and is fun, has some great animation, and narrated with some well done and entertaining voicework. Your party members each have five equipped skills with each skill able to be used in certain positions in the formation and can be used to target allies under certain conditions or enemies that are standing at a targetable spot in their formation. Your skills can inflict a mixture of damage, critical hits, heals, sanity restoration, stuns, knockbacks, pulls, burn damage over time, blight damage over time, dodge chance, armor to cut a percentage of damage, shields that have one character taking damage in place of an ally, bleed damage over time, set other characters up for additional skill effects, etc. Between each fight while traveling to the next event you can access the skill screen where you can swap out which five of a character's 11 skills will be active in the next battle, change your formation, and you can equip each character with two trinkets and one item they can use in combat. The ability to use items as a free action in combat, varied trinkets with some being made for certain characters, and each character now having a generic or three sub class types that makes certain abilities or resistances they have better or worse there is some good variety when it comes to party composition. Although a few of the subclasses can be a bit questionable in terms of viability or are clearly going to be worse than other options unless you are just wanting to mess around.
Character sanity levels have to be managed as well. Taking a critical hit or damage from certain types of attacks can raise their sanity meter from 1-10. Once you are around four you have a high chance during travel that someone's bad mood might worsen relationships or have negative effects, but in battle hitting the max of 10 will cause either a meltdown where they lose significant health and lower their relationship with allies or a small chance to become resolute where they will empty their sanity meter and heal themselves. Character relationships are raised or lowered through random event choices, random positive or negative effects during travel, item use in inns, and occasional based on actions taken in battles. Lower relationships give a chance for negative effects between two characters to take effect while higher levels give a chance to gain positive effects whenever you leave an inn. These relationship effects cause characters to give positive or negative effects to allies when certain skills are used or can have their friends jump in to buff, attack with them, or defend them in some way.
For the most part the game works fine except for a few issues people that liked the previous game or who would prefer that system might have. You are stuck with the same party (unless someone dies then a new character for each death can be randomly selected at an inn, which is potentially its own problem given some party compositions now working well), you are much more effected by bad luck or lack of area knowledge due to the much lengthier runs, the only thing you can carry over for a character is if they survive a run and you use them again they will keep the same positive and negative quirks and any disease they had by the end your skill training, relationships, and items are all reset.
The biggest issues with the game are the lack of content and busywork built into the design. Each location has one boss, a few repeated enemy types, and each of the five confession choices do little to influence the game other than possibly changing how many locations you need to go through, what kind of buffs certain types of enemies use, and the final boss. Some characters certainly feel a bit stronger than others but they all have their own feel to them and are well animated, but there are less characters than in the previous game and the Bounty Hunter has now been relegated to being a random chance party add you can find at an inn that has to replace one of your other characters for one location. When it comes to busywork you now have to find shrines during runs in order to unlock the majority of skills for each character. Each character starts with five unlocked skills and unlocks the other six by going through five events at these shrines, most of these are text/narration based that give you more insight into a character's past but a few will have a little objective based battle you engage in as their past self. A cool way to give more personality to characters and something that can come into play for them during the final boss battle with the last confession, but you might need to make 2-3 full runs per character to unlock all of their skills and many locked skills are things that are needed for a character to be useful. The game is significantly harder when characters lack their basic skills, especially when some parties just don't even have the ability to deal with certain threats without these options. This amounts to hours and hours of time to get these skills unlocked and as just an obvious bad design choice it means that when you see these shrines scouted you are almost certainly going to go for it no matter how bad of a route choice it might be as you ignore a part of the game just to get this over with.
The town upgrading over time has been replaced by a series of shrines you access before a run where you spend candles to unlock things, candles are gained from completing objectives or finding them in runs or by doing a character tasks that they have on each run (often killing a type of enemy or using an ability so many times in one battle). These unlocks are passive upgrades like unlocking other characters for use, increasing character resistances, unlocking subclasses, bonuses to your stagecoach that can include better scouting or ability to carry more items or find more candles, and you can use candles to unlock a wider variety of items that you can find in your runs, passive items that can make the game easier or harder like pets you or different types of flames you can add to the stagecoach, etc. At its best, you are spending time to basically just unlock basic game mechanics or to make things functional in the same way you do by unlocking character skills, and at worst once you have what you want the entire candle system just become almost pointless for the rest of the time you plan to play the game. On a positive note, a lot of games that have you unlocking a lot of items you can find in roguelite runs over is adding things to the world that are either nearly useless in general or nearly useless for many playstyles and while you can see items you will likely have little use for I tended to just notice more wider varieties of similar item types rather than a complete lack of things I need that have been replaced with more and more garbage over time. An odd oversight seems to be that you also start a run with the random items you have unlocked since your previous run so that added element could have given some minor use to the candles you will get at the end of each run but once you have unlocked everything it no longer allows you to spend candles on random items. It is also kind of unfortunate that, while you unlock some cosmetic character changes that alter weapons or colors, you can't unlock their past looks that characters have during their shrine events, it's also a minor annoyance that you can't save skill and subclass settings and that you need to reselect everything for each new run.
The randomness of the design can also lead to some unfortunate occurrences like just not having items you want appearing for sale, constant repeated types of events you are trying to avoid, characters wanting to do things during events that upset other characters (and probably don't often make mechanical sense or sense for the personality shown by them during their shrine events) or just don't make sense like wanting to get scouting information when you already have the map filled or are at the end of it or wanting to fix stagecoach armor or wheels when both are already at their highest condition.
It's a fun game but if you are trying to complete each of the character skill sets and get through every confession you are going to be seeing the same content over and over and over and it's a shame they didn't give much personality to characters when it comes to their interactions with each other since they took a route where each one is now their own unique person with their own past they you see. With future plans to add new enemies, bosses, and characters to the game more of the needed variety to your runs should be given as the game continues to grow.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1685793792908275713
Videos
Darkest Dungeon II - Seething Sigh Resentment Boss Battle: https://youtu.be/c7qMjAZjqQw
Darkest Dungeon 2 - Focused Fault Obsession Boss Battle (1.0 version of boss): https://youtu.be/fSk4bX5VW3I
Darkest Dungeon 2 - Ravenous Reach Ambition Boss Battle: https://youtu.be/YB6zVYO41Vo
2022
An SRPG with multiple story paths to take, a large cast of characters to use in fairly simple but varied battles, and while it can be inconsistent in every area it's a frequent shift between average and excellent.
The plot has you taking control of a young noble that is quickly betrothed to the half sister of the ruler of another nation and is given control of his house due to his father's illness. The continent holds three nations, Aesfrost in the north that focuses on ironwork and a system of freedom through meritocracy that has lead to a massive divide between the rich and poor, Holy State of Hyzante in the east that controls the one known source of salt on the continent where all the citizens seem to be cared for but all have to follow the teachings of and worship a goddess, and the kingdom of Glenbrook which boasts a fairer climate than the other two nations harsh snow and desert and whose rivers and location makes it a center of trade. After a long war ended 30 years ago a joint mining venture between the three nations brings many of the higher ranking members of each country together to celebrate their alliance, but shortly after the delegates return home Arsfrost attacks and takes over the capital of your kingdom. As the new lord of one of the kingdoms three most prominent houses you, your best friend and youngest prince, future wife that is descended from a persecuted people in Hyzante, and your father's long serving advisor have to decide the best way forward.
The writing is often a more average JRPG quality with the normal ridiculous moments of characters things like "haven't we shed blood as well," "how can we hold on to our honor," "shouldn't peace and friendship be our goal." I've defended my party and people from bandits, a nation of imperialist cultists, imperialist betrayers, and bandits I don't think we need all the whining. But when the game hits the bigger moments, the character defining moments, the ends of narrative arcs, the clashes between some of the main enemies or ideologies the writing starts to get quite good, not Tactics Ogre Let Us Cling Together quality, but reaching a bar many games of the genre don't and in those moment the music often goes from a normal good but forgettable standard to also suddenly being excellent and working to further enhance the best moments of the game. It was nice to see that, despite the setup, I've again played one of the seeming few JRPGs where they did not take the narrative route of setting up a monarchy as a good system of government so long as it ends with a nice guy on the throne.
A strong point of the game is that many chapters have two or three options laid out by different characters as a way to proceed and the main members of your house vote on which route to take, with you being able to attempt to persuade anyone to the side you want and with the deciding vote if there is a tie. You can more easily persuade people if your conviction in one of three areas is aligned with what and who you are talking to, combined with choose the right dialogue with some possibly locked behind information found through exploration. You build points in morality utility, and freedom by your choices when talking to people, vote choices and persuasions, and smaller amounts of points through more minor actions based on a variety of actions you can take in battle or exploration. While the routes are interesting and some of the choices are difficult to guess what will happen and how much it can change the story, the actual voting and conviction system I really could have done without as it isn't mechanically interesting and never had any real effect on anything.
The conviction system thankfully stays out of the game enough where your past choices, potential for the true ending aside as that requires certain routes to be taken, won't lock you into any set options in the the future, which that just further highlights how meaningless it tends to be. You are really only using it to do two things, building up enough of one or two of the three types of conviction that side characters will come to join your house and higher values of a particular type make it easier to convince the seven main characters in your house to vote the way you want them to when making a decision that will alter the plot or change the next or next couple sections of the game. Unless you really focus on only one area, you can pretty much get the group to do whatever you want, and you should have so much of each conviction in a new game plus (which the game clearly wants you to run through multiple times to see that paths, get the true ending, unlock all characters, get all the character upgrades, etc) that you can definitely do whatever you want then. It is nice to see character's perspectives on different issues, but it might as well have just had them all talk it out and you pick the way the conversation gets steered instead of taking a vote where you may or may not have convinced particular characters of the choice and no one ever mentions any kind of disagreement again. I went into the game slightly blind and assumed that the voting system was you trying to convince other nobles of your kingdom or people from other nations to take up plans that change the games or that might give positive or negative effects to situations and battles, not that you would just be dealing with your seven friends that can typically be easily convinced of anything.
The battle system typically has you deploying from 9-12 characters with two of the main mechanics being to manage each character's TP that allow them to access their skills and to maneuver your characters in such a way that you can attack enemies while having a character on each side of them (or firing off a ranged attack while an ally is on the opposite side of them). There are a few considerations to take into account such as archers having greater ranged if they are on higher terrain, attacks having a higher hit chance if you have the high ground or are directly behind an opponent, and terrain can either offer minor benefits or can have spells chain lightning over water or freeze tiles to slow movement, start fires in some areas, or melt ice to create puddles. Every character gets a move action and can use one of their abilities each turn, this can be done in any order and there are a few movement skills that allow you to move, use the skill for further movement, and then take another skill action. It's a fairly simple system as characters learn only a few active and passive skills as they level up and are promoted but it works well, is easy to get into, tends to play out fairly quickly, and some of the map designs combined with the varied types of characters you can use keep things interesting. Each character has a main attack that used no TP and abilities that use between 1-4, 0 (for some rare abilities you can acquire passives to reduce the cost of), or all the TP the character currently has. Depending on their current class promotion, each character can hold between 3-5 points, recovers one each turn, and starts a battle with three. Certain characters might have various ways to gain more such as killing an enemy, standing on a certain kind of surface, not moving, hitting multiple enemies at once, starting a battle with more TP, or being able to add or give TP to other characters or to remove it from enemy units.
There is a large roster of characters that each have their own class and many with skills and passives completely unique to them. Some of those skills and a few entire characters specialize or can do things that are so situational or so time consuming to set up that they aren't that practical to use in comparison to other skills or characters, or a character might take so long and so many promotions to learn some valuable skills that they just won't be too useful or interesting to use until very late game or into new game plus (though the game's format does make multiple runs with different routes the main way to experience the full story, side battles, and mechanics), or they are an ok character that could have been a lot of fun to use if they just went a little further with their skill set in giving them a more defined role. One character can set up ladders on the battlefield so he and other characters can climb up to higher terrain like up buildings or steep cliffs, usually completely worthless especially as you unlock more movement based skills but you can basically break some battles with this as he can remove the ladder so enemies can't use it. Each character can have upgrades by spending money and resources at your blacksmith in the encampment area. The upgrades include bonuses two weapon upgrades that alter the look of their weapon and give access to tier 2 and 3 upgrades, upgrades to damage and/or healing done, most characters have an upgrade that you can toggle between two different options that can influence their skills or make them better at filling a certain role, an ultimate weapon ability that gives the character one new high TP cost skill, and unfortunately a lot of very underwhelming stat increases. The material cost of these upgrades increases on a tier with each upgrade very quickly and as materials can be difficult to find and you will likely take the more obviously useful upgrades first you can be left with a lot of dull +1 defense, +1 magic defense, +1 speed, etc style upgrades that just isn't that exciting when your stats are probably around the 20s-50s anyway and a few of the characters have some passive upgrades that just isn't of much use. +1 Defense to your mages isn't going to do much to their ability to tank damage, or to survive at all most likely.
Each of the eight main characters and 22 side character that you recruit either through story choices or by getting one or two of your conviction scores to the needed level will also have short scenes for their own personal story unlocked when you use them enough times in battle. The stories are of mixed quality, usually they rush through them with most only having a recruitment scene and two others doesn't give them much time to develop but through those scenes they do tend to interact with members of the main cast throughout many of their events. One issues with a few of the side characters and the conviction system is that there are a few of these potential recruits that should have a much larger impact on the story once they join you and it makes no narrative sense that they don't become main characters or have more or any plot interactions and even though they join you like some of the main characters do they have no say or appearance in any of the voting segments further highlighting its uninteresting mechanics.
Through an option at your encampment, that you can enter from the world map or during exploration, every main story battle that you have fought can be replayed (and they carry over in the list in new game+) as well as a large number of side battles with new and more difficult ones being added in the new game+ mode. Some maps are reused here but they will have some mixture of new unit placement for both sides, new enemy units, and possibly different objectives. Having new side battles, higher level enemies, and having all the abilities of characters now in earlier fights can make playing through the game again interesting, more so when taking new routes, but you will be seeing a lot of the same fights again and even more so if you attempt to unlock every character that would require at least four playthroughs.
A more recent patch added an epilogue scene to the true ending that gives some of the characters a more complete ending to their stories.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1685382576456990720
The plot has you taking control of a young noble that is quickly betrothed to the half sister of the ruler of another nation and is given control of his house due to his father's illness. The continent holds three nations, Aesfrost in the north that focuses on ironwork and a system of freedom through meritocracy that has lead to a massive divide between the rich and poor, Holy State of Hyzante in the east that controls the one known source of salt on the continent where all the citizens seem to be cared for but all have to follow the teachings of and worship a goddess, and the kingdom of Glenbrook which boasts a fairer climate than the other two nations harsh snow and desert and whose rivers and location makes it a center of trade. After a long war ended 30 years ago a joint mining venture between the three nations brings many of the higher ranking members of each country together to celebrate their alliance, but shortly after the delegates return home Arsfrost attacks and takes over the capital of your kingdom. As the new lord of one of the kingdoms three most prominent houses you, your best friend and youngest prince, future wife that is descended from a persecuted people in Hyzante, and your father's long serving advisor have to decide the best way forward.
The writing is often a more average JRPG quality with the normal ridiculous moments of characters things like "haven't we shed blood as well," "how can we hold on to our honor," "shouldn't peace and friendship be our goal." I've defended my party and people from bandits, a nation of imperialist cultists, imperialist betrayers, and bandits I don't think we need all the whining. But when the game hits the bigger moments, the character defining moments, the ends of narrative arcs, the clashes between some of the main enemies or ideologies the writing starts to get quite good, not Tactics Ogre Let Us Cling Together quality, but reaching a bar many games of the genre don't and in those moment the music often goes from a normal good but forgettable standard to also suddenly being excellent and working to further enhance the best moments of the game. It was nice to see that, despite the setup, I've again played one of the seeming few JRPGs where they did not take the narrative route of setting up a monarchy as a good system of government so long as it ends with a nice guy on the throne.
A strong point of the game is that many chapters have two or three options laid out by different characters as a way to proceed and the main members of your house vote on which route to take, with you being able to attempt to persuade anyone to the side you want and with the deciding vote if there is a tie. You can more easily persuade people if your conviction in one of three areas is aligned with what and who you are talking to, combined with choose the right dialogue with some possibly locked behind information found through exploration. You build points in morality utility, and freedom by your choices when talking to people, vote choices and persuasions, and smaller amounts of points through more minor actions based on a variety of actions you can take in battle or exploration. While the routes are interesting and some of the choices are difficult to guess what will happen and how much it can change the story, the actual voting and conviction system I really could have done without as it isn't mechanically interesting and never had any real effect on anything.
The conviction system thankfully stays out of the game enough where your past choices, potential for the true ending aside as that requires certain routes to be taken, won't lock you into any set options in the the future, which that just further highlights how meaningless it tends to be. You are really only using it to do two things, building up enough of one or two of the three types of conviction that side characters will come to join your house and higher values of a particular type make it easier to convince the seven main characters in your house to vote the way you want them to when making a decision that will alter the plot or change the next or next couple sections of the game. Unless you really focus on only one area, you can pretty much get the group to do whatever you want, and you should have so much of each conviction in a new game plus (which the game clearly wants you to run through multiple times to see that paths, get the true ending, unlock all characters, get all the character upgrades, etc) that you can definitely do whatever you want then. It is nice to see character's perspectives on different issues, but it might as well have just had them all talk it out and you pick the way the conversation gets steered instead of taking a vote where you may or may not have convinced particular characters of the choice and no one ever mentions any kind of disagreement again. I went into the game slightly blind and assumed that the voting system was you trying to convince other nobles of your kingdom or people from other nations to take up plans that change the games or that might give positive or negative effects to situations and battles, not that you would just be dealing with your seven friends that can typically be easily convinced of anything.
The battle system typically has you deploying from 9-12 characters with two of the main mechanics being to manage each character's TP that allow them to access their skills and to maneuver your characters in such a way that you can attack enemies while having a character on each side of them (or firing off a ranged attack while an ally is on the opposite side of them). There are a few considerations to take into account such as archers having greater ranged if they are on higher terrain, attacks having a higher hit chance if you have the high ground or are directly behind an opponent, and terrain can either offer minor benefits or can have spells chain lightning over water or freeze tiles to slow movement, start fires in some areas, or melt ice to create puddles. Every character gets a move action and can use one of their abilities each turn, this can be done in any order and there are a few movement skills that allow you to move, use the skill for further movement, and then take another skill action. It's a fairly simple system as characters learn only a few active and passive skills as they level up and are promoted but it works well, is easy to get into, tends to play out fairly quickly, and some of the map designs combined with the varied types of characters you can use keep things interesting. Each character has a main attack that used no TP and abilities that use between 1-4, 0 (for some rare abilities you can acquire passives to reduce the cost of), or all the TP the character currently has. Depending on their current class promotion, each character can hold between 3-5 points, recovers one each turn, and starts a battle with three. Certain characters might have various ways to gain more such as killing an enemy, standing on a certain kind of surface, not moving, hitting multiple enemies at once, starting a battle with more TP, or being able to add or give TP to other characters or to remove it from enemy units.
There is a large roster of characters that each have their own class and many with skills and passives completely unique to them. Some of those skills and a few entire characters specialize or can do things that are so situational or so time consuming to set up that they aren't that practical to use in comparison to other skills or characters, or a character might take so long and so many promotions to learn some valuable skills that they just won't be too useful or interesting to use until very late game or into new game plus (though the game's format does make multiple runs with different routes the main way to experience the full story, side battles, and mechanics), or they are an ok character that could have been a lot of fun to use if they just went a little further with their skill set in giving them a more defined role. One character can set up ladders on the battlefield so he and other characters can climb up to higher terrain like up buildings or steep cliffs, usually completely worthless especially as you unlock more movement based skills but you can basically break some battles with this as he can remove the ladder so enemies can't use it. Each character can have upgrades by spending money and resources at your blacksmith in the encampment area. The upgrades include bonuses two weapon upgrades that alter the look of their weapon and give access to tier 2 and 3 upgrades, upgrades to damage and/or healing done, most characters have an upgrade that you can toggle between two different options that can influence their skills or make them better at filling a certain role, an ultimate weapon ability that gives the character one new high TP cost skill, and unfortunately a lot of very underwhelming stat increases. The material cost of these upgrades increases on a tier with each upgrade very quickly and as materials can be difficult to find and you will likely take the more obviously useful upgrades first you can be left with a lot of dull +1 defense, +1 magic defense, +1 speed, etc style upgrades that just isn't that exciting when your stats are probably around the 20s-50s anyway and a few of the characters have some passive upgrades that just isn't of much use. +1 Defense to your mages isn't going to do much to their ability to tank damage, or to survive at all most likely.
Each of the eight main characters and 22 side character that you recruit either through story choices or by getting one or two of your conviction scores to the needed level will also have short scenes for their own personal story unlocked when you use them enough times in battle. The stories are of mixed quality, usually they rush through them with most only having a recruitment scene and two others doesn't give them much time to develop but through those scenes they do tend to interact with members of the main cast throughout many of their events. One issues with a few of the side characters and the conviction system is that there are a few of these potential recruits that should have a much larger impact on the story once they join you and it makes no narrative sense that they don't become main characters or have more or any plot interactions and even though they join you like some of the main characters do they have no say or appearance in any of the voting segments further highlighting its uninteresting mechanics.
Through an option at your encampment, that you can enter from the world map or during exploration, every main story battle that you have fought can be replayed (and they carry over in the list in new game+) as well as a large number of side battles with new and more difficult ones being added in the new game+ mode. Some maps are reused here but they will have some mixture of new unit placement for both sides, new enemy units, and possibly different objectives. Having new side battles, higher level enemies, and having all the abilities of characters now in earlier fights can make playing through the game again interesting, more so when taking new routes, but you will be seeing a lot of the same fights again and even more so if you attempt to unlock every character that would require at least four playthroughs.
A more recent patch added an epilogue scene to the true ending that gives some of the characters a more complete ending to their stories.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1685382576456990720
2022
An interesting concept but nothing about the mechanics, characters, segments, or narrative fits together in any kind of sensible cohesive way. Though it is often entertaining until the last few broadcasts long overstayed their welcome while doing nothing new mechanically or when it's adding odd elements of pointless family expenses, drama, or tragedy.
An FMV game that has you taking over the vision mixing, censoring, ad picking, headline lean, and other tasks at a news station just as a new political party has been elected. Your choices on what to air at certain times, choices made in text segments between broadcast days, and which and if you follow certain orders or suggestions while doing your job can see the story take different paths or characters actions and fates change over a span of around 10 years.
The actual mechanics end up keeping things evolving over time tend to be dull, often poorly explained to begin with, and trying to get a particular result can lead to confusing moments. Both poor and nonsensical as any kind of political commentary which hurts text story and choice moments drama, tone is all over, segments can overstay their welcome but each broadcast day does have a checkpoint after each ad break. Often entertaining and funny when not focused on the main plot (unless you aren't entertained by a particular segment and find yourself needing to do dull tasks for 10-15 minutes before it ends unless you fail out of it or worse miss something for the narrative you wanted to do then have to go through the whole thing again) but then, due to the style of the game, you will be punished for paying too much attention to the actors and may need to see things you missed after the gameplay segments where you can review the footage that was broadcast, play the ad videos without listening into studio talk or orders, or view the moments that weren't completely available to you. When you preform actions for narrative purposes, sometimes it hurts your broadcast and possibly your score for the segment, but letting the more obvious things happen like playing certain ads or allowing the broadcast to be disrupted don't damage your score or really cause you any problems with getting fired or arrested. I wasn't sure why I was gaining or losing score during certain segments but since it only impacts your money that doesn't really seem to matter it never made much of a difference to me if I was getting an A+ or D.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1680375861428752385
An FMV game that has you taking over the vision mixing, censoring, ad picking, headline lean, and other tasks at a news station just as a new political party has been elected. Your choices on what to air at certain times, choices made in text segments between broadcast days, and which and if you follow certain orders or suggestions while doing your job can see the story take different paths or characters actions and fates change over a span of around 10 years.
The actual mechanics end up keeping things evolving over time tend to be dull, often poorly explained to begin with, and trying to get a particular result can lead to confusing moments. Both poor and nonsensical as any kind of political commentary which hurts text story and choice moments drama, tone is all over, segments can overstay their welcome but each broadcast day does have a checkpoint after each ad break. Often entertaining and funny when not focused on the main plot (unless you aren't entertained by a particular segment and find yourself needing to do dull tasks for 10-15 minutes before it ends unless you fail out of it or worse miss something for the narrative you wanted to do then have to go through the whole thing again) but then, due to the style of the game, you will be punished for paying too much attention to the actors and may need to see things you missed after the gameplay segments where you can review the footage that was broadcast, play the ad videos without listening into studio talk or orders, or view the moments that weren't completely available to you. When you preform actions for narrative purposes, sometimes it hurts your broadcast and possibly your score for the segment, but letting the more obvious things happen like playing certain ads or allowing the broadcast to be disrupted don't damage your score or really cause you any problems with getting fired or arrested. I wasn't sure why I was gaining or losing score during certain segments but since it only impacts your money that doesn't really seem to matter it never made much of a difference to me if I was getting an A+ or D.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1680375861428752385
2019
Decent beat em up that just makes it into recommended territory for me. Four character and a large enough moveset to keep things interesting but nothing pushes it much further than being average.
Good basic combos to string together with the punch and kick button, alternating between them can extend the combo and both types of attacks have their own combo finishers with the punch combo being able to end knocking the enemy down or up if you hold that direction. You can do two special attack that drains your health with the push of a button with one activating while stationary and the other while moving, you can unleash a high damage area clearing attack when a special meter fills, activate a rage mode where you ignore damage, do more damage, and are harder to stun, can grab and then continue to hit or throw enemies from the front or behind, a dodge up or down can be performed by hitting up or down twice while hitting left or right twice or holding a button allows you to run. In a more unique feature there is a button to draw and fire a gun that can keep enemies back or destroy hazards. Each of the four characters has their own strengths, moves, and each uses a different type of gun.
Somewhat overly long with no saves but does have a stage select, a bit too much focus on a poor story that really lacks humor or excitement. There are some different types of stages thrown in for variety like driving while shooting at enemy cars with a gatling gun and shooting down enemy jets and helicopter while in a jet of your own dodging missiles. These two different stages aren't interesting enough to want more of them but it does briefly change things up. Dull melee weapons, I don't understand why this is such a problem with beat em up games, you can get a crowbar or katana and both are swung like a club that knocks the enemy down where you can then just stand over them to repeat the attack over and over again. With the rage meter, special meter, and ability to just walk around with the katana or crowbar when you find one until you drop it three times the game is very easy and I only lost lives in the last stage when you fight some high damage dealing robot enemies, fight all the bosses again, then fight the end boss.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1678992381407014912
Good basic combos to string together with the punch and kick button, alternating between them can extend the combo and both types of attacks have their own combo finishers with the punch combo being able to end knocking the enemy down or up if you hold that direction. You can do two special attack that drains your health with the push of a button with one activating while stationary and the other while moving, you can unleash a high damage area clearing attack when a special meter fills, activate a rage mode where you ignore damage, do more damage, and are harder to stun, can grab and then continue to hit or throw enemies from the front or behind, a dodge up or down can be performed by hitting up or down twice while hitting left or right twice or holding a button allows you to run. In a more unique feature there is a button to draw and fire a gun that can keep enemies back or destroy hazards. Each of the four characters has their own strengths, moves, and each uses a different type of gun.
Somewhat overly long with no saves but does have a stage select, a bit too much focus on a poor story that really lacks humor or excitement. There are some different types of stages thrown in for variety like driving while shooting at enemy cars with a gatling gun and shooting down enemy jets and helicopter while in a jet of your own dodging missiles. These two different stages aren't interesting enough to want more of them but it does briefly change things up. Dull melee weapons, I don't understand why this is such a problem with beat em up games, you can get a crowbar or katana and both are swung like a club that knocks the enemy down where you can then just stand over them to repeat the attack over and over again. With the rage meter, special meter, and ability to just walk around with the katana or crowbar when you find one until you drop it three times the game is very easy and I only lost lives in the last stage when you fight some high damage dealing robot enemies, fight all the bosses again, then fight the end boss.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1678992381407014912
2009
Fun, fast paced, and ridiculous action game with a large number of combos, deep gameplay, varied weapons, and unique and amusing mechanics. Regular attacks can be extended with gun attacks from the pistols she carries and wears on her feet, variety of combos to chain attacks before summoning a body part or creature for a more powerful move, enemies that have taken enough damage can be finished by summoning torture machines, your whip can pull enemies to you to create openings for other combos, a sword has a variety of charged attacks that allow you to charge the weapon while still being able to perform dodges, perfectly timed dodges temporarily slows time.
The only issues I ever had with the game was how quickly you were expected to mash a button on some of the torture attacks and the large bosses you fight just aren't as much fun as a smaller scale but faster paced fight with Jeanne.
One of the best action games made further improved in the newer PC version that has a better framerate and more visual options.
The only issues I ever had with the game was how quickly you were expected to mash a button on some of the torture attacks and the large bosses you fight just aren't as much fun as a smaller scale but faster paced fight with Jeanne.
One of the best action games made further improved in the newer PC version that has a better framerate and more visual options.
2021
Solid enough combat, environment design, and variety of ways to progress that I still mostly enjoyed a style of game I'm not usually much of a fan of even without finding one of its main features interesting enough to not turn off.
Top down action adventure with Zelda like elements and a timer that can be turned off where the other characters you meet and your own character will eventually lose their minds and become like the game's enemies unless you give them a limited supply of items you can find that will add to their time limit. The story involves your character waking up with some memories missing in a destroyed city where the remaining robots were at war with humans. Years ago a meteor crash left a crystal-like object on the planet that gave the machines sentience by giving them anima. During the war with humans they did something that blocked the anima from that object from reaching the remaining robots and over time they started to lose their minds and become violent. The main character is told to retrieve five fragments from the meteor that were given to powerful robots that they had lost contact with in order to forge a weapon that will allow her to enter the structure blocking the spread of anima while also attempting to find her girlfriend she had been fighting alongside before being damaged.
You can equip your character with three loadouts of two weapons that include swords, axes, grenade launchers, shuriken you can control after throwing (more useful for puzzles than combat), and guns with some having fire, lightning, and ice elemental effects. You can slot chips into your character with stronger ones taking up more of your limited space to influence the damage you do, your health, stamina, reload speed, and to add a variety of other helpful effects. Combat is fast paced as you can quickly run and dive and turn those moves into quick attacks but your strongest source of damage comes from parrying an enemy attack right before it hits you which will put them in a stunned state where a hit will cause massive damage to them. The ranged weapons make use of a Gears of War style reload system where you can reload much faster if you hit the reload button and then hit it again when a fast moving meter is just over a notch in the middle of the UI.
You are given a variety of ways to sequence break or to take different paths as they are multiple ways to deal with certain kinds of obstacles with what you have available, skills you might not know about at first like wall jumping or attacking while jumping to gain extra distance. You might cross over water by finding switches that make platforms, use a single or double hookshot to swing across, use a spinning top you can stand on to bounce over the water, use an ice grenade to create temporary platforms of ice, etc. Your ability to do things like that are further enhanced by being able to craft most of the games items from blueprints even if you haven't found or bought the blueprint by remembering what items and configurations craft what. The environments and enemies are typically well designed and animated.
Usually I am not a fan of this kind of Zelda like genre. I normally find combat and combat options too simplistic, which is improved here, but what I didn't find any better is the environment and puzzle design. There is a lot of fairly useless things to find, you'll run into multiple puzzles where to need to push blocks around or slide them over an icy surface in ways that will land them in the correct slots, you'll run back and forth to activate switches to make the right blocks appear or platforms to rise or lower. There are a lot of dungeon design choices and side activities that are little more than time wasting busywork to run the clock out for yourself or other characters, a timer which I just ended up turning off as it both added nothing to the game for me and I wanted to take some time to test things out. New game plus and new game extra modes allow you to start a game again with different things carried over from your last playthrough and that combined with the knowledge you have of the game now is the main way you would be expected to be able to save the majority of or all of the game's characters if you are playing with the timers. Most of the game's characters are pretty low on personality and likely due to the mechanics of the game most aren't able to do much for you when they are alive as what they provide can often be earned in other ways or just isn't important at all. It gives you very little personality to your existing enemies and most bosses and that seems like a place where more of the narrative could have focused. There's some small moments with characters like the one that just uses the last of his time fishing to clear garbage from the water for the remaining fish but I can't find much use for the timer when you only vaguely care about like three people and the game would just be set up to say, "ok just run through it all again but faster now that you know exactly what to do and start with an advantage." It's not Pathologic where you have to make some hard choices.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1677886408860762113
Top down action adventure with Zelda like elements and a timer that can be turned off where the other characters you meet and your own character will eventually lose their minds and become like the game's enemies unless you give them a limited supply of items you can find that will add to their time limit. The story involves your character waking up with some memories missing in a destroyed city where the remaining robots were at war with humans. Years ago a meteor crash left a crystal-like object on the planet that gave the machines sentience by giving them anima. During the war with humans they did something that blocked the anima from that object from reaching the remaining robots and over time they started to lose their minds and become violent. The main character is told to retrieve five fragments from the meteor that were given to powerful robots that they had lost contact with in order to forge a weapon that will allow her to enter the structure blocking the spread of anima while also attempting to find her girlfriend she had been fighting alongside before being damaged.
You can equip your character with three loadouts of two weapons that include swords, axes, grenade launchers, shuriken you can control after throwing (more useful for puzzles than combat), and guns with some having fire, lightning, and ice elemental effects. You can slot chips into your character with stronger ones taking up more of your limited space to influence the damage you do, your health, stamina, reload speed, and to add a variety of other helpful effects. Combat is fast paced as you can quickly run and dive and turn those moves into quick attacks but your strongest source of damage comes from parrying an enemy attack right before it hits you which will put them in a stunned state where a hit will cause massive damage to them. The ranged weapons make use of a Gears of War style reload system where you can reload much faster if you hit the reload button and then hit it again when a fast moving meter is just over a notch in the middle of the UI.
You are given a variety of ways to sequence break or to take different paths as they are multiple ways to deal with certain kinds of obstacles with what you have available, skills you might not know about at first like wall jumping or attacking while jumping to gain extra distance. You might cross over water by finding switches that make platforms, use a single or double hookshot to swing across, use a spinning top you can stand on to bounce over the water, use an ice grenade to create temporary platforms of ice, etc. Your ability to do things like that are further enhanced by being able to craft most of the games items from blueprints even if you haven't found or bought the blueprint by remembering what items and configurations craft what. The environments and enemies are typically well designed and animated.
Usually I am not a fan of this kind of Zelda like genre. I normally find combat and combat options too simplistic, which is improved here, but what I didn't find any better is the environment and puzzle design. There is a lot of fairly useless things to find, you'll run into multiple puzzles where to need to push blocks around or slide them over an icy surface in ways that will land them in the correct slots, you'll run back and forth to activate switches to make the right blocks appear or platforms to rise or lower. There are a lot of dungeon design choices and side activities that are little more than time wasting busywork to run the clock out for yourself or other characters, a timer which I just ended up turning off as it both added nothing to the game for me and I wanted to take some time to test things out. New game plus and new game extra modes allow you to start a game again with different things carried over from your last playthrough and that combined with the knowledge you have of the game now is the main way you would be expected to be able to save the majority of or all of the game's characters if you are playing with the timers. Most of the game's characters are pretty low on personality and likely due to the mechanics of the game most aren't able to do much for you when they are alive as what they provide can often be earned in other ways or just isn't important at all. It gives you very little personality to your existing enemies and most bosses and that seems like a place where more of the narrative could have focused. There's some small moments with characters like the one that just uses the last of his time fishing to clear garbage from the water for the remaining fish but I can't find much use for the timer when you only vaguely care about like three people and the game would just be set up to say, "ok just run through it all again but faster now that you know exactly what to do and start with an advantage." It's not Pathologic where you have to make some hard choices.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1677886408860762113
1993
Horizontal shooter. I played through the Japanese version which has an ok if unmemorable soundtrack (and story wise is apparently still in English), US release had terrible sounding dance tracks like Y'all Ready For This that were also too quiet compared to the other sound effects. You have a main shot that can be turned into a wider spread, laser, or wide shot in front and behind you and two missiles that can be set to straight, spread, or homing based on powerup. A fast charging bar allows you to activate a rotating and damage causing shield you can fire at enemies.
This is actually a fairly unique and interesting mechanic that needs to be taken advantage of both as a means of doing extra damage and to survive the fairly large number of fast moving shots enemies can fire at you. The quick recharge rate of the shield and the balance between keeping it on you and launching it at enemies gives some strategy but often doesn't leave you completely helpless. Some sections have walls or paths in the stages and with most enemy shots not going through objects this cover can also give you a chance to recharge. Death will also use up a life but will spawn you back where you died with the same upgrades as the game keeps going.
The problems with the game is that the enemies are fairly dull and most are repeated in each stage, there is nothing interesting about your main weapons, the bosses are pretty easy and don't do anything mechanically or visually interesting, it is on the shorter side, level have some ok backgrounds but don't do anything interesting, and for a 93 release the game is bland visually. And I would definitely not want to listen to the US versions terrible renditions of dance music.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1676873523753816066
This is actually a fairly unique and interesting mechanic that needs to be taken advantage of both as a means of doing extra damage and to survive the fairly large number of fast moving shots enemies can fire at you. The quick recharge rate of the shield and the balance between keeping it on you and launching it at enemies gives some strategy but often doesn't leave you completely helpless. Some sections have walls or paths in the stages and with most enemy shots not going through objects this cover can also give you a chance to recharge. Death will also use up a life but will spawn you back where you died with the same upgrades as the game keeps going.
The problems with the game is that the enemies are fairly dull and most are repeated in each stage, there is nothing interesting about your main weapons, the bosses are pretty easy and don't do anything mechanically or visually interesting, it is on the shorter side, level have some ok backgrounds but don't do anything interesting, and for a 93 release the game is bland visually. And I would definitely not want to listen to the US versions terrible renditions of dance music.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1676873523753816066
Vertical shooter. You can adjust your speed, fire bombs, and in an usual feature hold L and R to direct your shots to the left or right or hold both to fire behind you. Your health and weapon power is connected to collecting three small cakes or one large one that can enhance your power twice, getting hit drops power by one. Enemies and bosses are mediocre, none of the other weapon pickups seems like they would be more useful than the default, stage design is dull, music is instantly forgettable, it is almost impossible to die until the last stage and death starts you in the same spot you died. Playable but does nothing well.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1676493912553422848
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1676493912553422848
2020
FMV video dating sim where you pick three of five girls for a first date, two for a second, then one for a third as long as you are able to answer questions in a way that they like. In between dates main character and his best friend interact over calls, of course they seem to have as much or more chemistry like always. Acted well but its too short and limited to particularly care about anything, and the only one of the five dates I could almost tolerate in real life or would find attractive would be Shaina. Part of the problem is there are multiple questions you really should ask and that might be somewhat obvious but you never get an answer for unless you start the game again to choose different, needing to replay a character multiple times in completely new games is a needlessly tedious way to try to create replay value when just getting more time with each character in one playthrough would have just made more sense.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1676409036101779457
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1676409036101779457
1991
Horizontal shooter. Drops the two player support of the arcade version and adds the ability to select between eight weapons at the start of each stage or at each continue use instead of four. Also changes some stages and enemies, and removes the ending plot.
You can swap between three speed levels, though I never felt a need to go under the max. As you gain score your weapons level up to five and get stronger, you always have two option weapons you can change between four different modes as you level they both do damage to enemies they touch and destroy some types of enemy bullets. You first have the ability to have them inside your ship or to spin more defensively around you while firing and as you level up you get the choice to have them act more independently as they split up and move around based on your movement and finally you unlock a more aggressive mode that has them both move together locking onto enemies and staying right in front of the until they are destroyed. Some weapons are more viable as you level up like the grenades and some like the homing shot or s laser are great all the time (except for the final boss where they auto aim at an unkillable target). You can take three hits and dying allows you to continue at the start of the stage but you keep your current level progress. Decent music, nothing too interesting about the backgrounds or enemy design but not bad or too repetitive. Solid shooter with a fairly easy normal difficulty (depending on weapon choice, and ignoring the final boss).
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1676354381384675329
You can swap between three speed levels, though I never felt a need to go under the max. As you gain score your weapons level up to five and get stronger, you always have two option weapons you can change between four different modes as you level they both do damage to enemies they touch and destroy some types of enemy bullets. You first have the ability to have them inside your ship or to spin more defensively around you while firing and as you level up you get the choice to have them act more independently as they split up and move around based on your movement and finally you unlock a more aggressive mode that has them both move together locking onto enemies and staying right in front of the until they are destroyed. Some weapons are more viable as you level up like the grenades and some like the homing shot or s laser are great all the time (except for the final boss where they auto aim at an unkillable target). You can take three hits and dying allows you to continue at the start of the stage but you keep your current level progress. Decent music, nothing too interesting about the backgrounds or enemy design but not bad or too repetitive. Solid shooter with a fairly easy normal difficulty (depending on weapon choice, and ignoring the final boss).
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1676354381384675329
1993
Horizontal shooter. Three ships to choose from that each go through three different shot types as you max out your weapon upgrades. The difficulty of the game comes more from how long it takes to max out your upgrades, potential upgrades that can temporarily make the game more difficult, and a checkpoint system that has you lose your upgrades. The main way to stay alive is through frequent shield drops. You can also swap between two sub weapons, higher damaging missiles or faster shooting lasers. Firing the main and sub weapon together lowers the power of both, which probably wasn't need. A lot of sections where a wave or waves of enemies suddenly appear from multiple angles and have difficult to avoid attacks unless you knew about it ahead of time due to your fairly slow movement speed. Has more subdued soundtrack but I liked it. Multiple routes to choose from but some levels are fairly similar to others and many of the bosses pose little threat.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1676174878175797249
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1676174878175797249
1991
Horizontal shoot em up. Upgrades to main attack, shield, and additional weapon that starts by dropping a bomb in front and below you and will later fire out beams in four directions in front and behind you. Stages can become repetitive, it becomes overly difficult with no continues and enemy attacks that just kind of appear out of nowhere for some enemy types while others can just rush in from off screen behind you.