Lucca202
BACKER
2022
Stacklands is a twist on management games: every object in the game, from people to buildings to resources to money, is represented by a card on the game board. These cards interact through being stacked on top of one another, causing an item to be equipped, a building to be built from the required materials, or a production cycle to be initiated. By producing excess goods and selling them, the player can buy booster packs, which unlock new cards and new recipes for buildings and items. Over time, new areas are unlocked, as well as powerful foes to do battle against.
The game takes place over turns called moons, which last for a few real time minutes. At the end of each moon, all your villagers have to be fed -- if there's not enough food cards, unfed villagers will starve and die. Aside from that, random events may occur between moons, some of which force your people into battle, and that may also result in their demise. Either way, should you run out of people cards at any moment, the game ends. It's easy to understand in theory, but Stacklands teaches little and forces the player to learn everything from experience, making the early game rocky. And that is but the first of its problems.
What could have been an outstanding game is merely fine, thanks to some questionable design choices and a rough execution. In Stacklands. annoyance is part of the game's mechanics: cards collide with one another and push each other off to the sides, messing up the board and adding some annoying glitches to the mix. Some cards allow for making compact stacks of the same type of card, or guiding your villagers towards certain foods, but those take time and resources to make and only solve part of the problems. Fundamentally, though, the floatiness of the game's objects eliminates their physicality as cards, downgrading Stacklands from an interesting card game to a more generic management one.
There's also a severe lack of quality of life options. If playing on the Steam Deck, you'll immediately feel it in your hands: the controller support is awful, if not on its own, because of glitches stemming from a misuse of Unity's (admittedly terrible) UI navigation system. That the game should not have the Steam Deck Verified seal is a given, but even playing with a mouse, the UI could have been so much more helpful, like by allowing for certain shortcuts, warning about finished tasks, or the presence and position of enemies and the like. It could also provide more guidance, not just in the beginning of the game, but also, when you're about to do something that would, I don't know, summon an incredibly powerful boss that might end your run or something.
On that note, Stacklands should not have had permadeath. Yes, I know card-based roguelikes are all the rage nowadays, but that doesn't mean just any card-adjacent game should have permadeath in it: a full run of Stacklands with the current updates takes upwards of ten hours. Imagine dying to the final boss and having to redo everything -- I almost feel bad for saying Dead Cells had it bad with its deaths. A save option, even if it was a consumable item you had to create with rare materials, would have been welcome.
The game takes place over turns called moons, which last for a few real time minutes. At the end of each moon, all your villagers have to be fed -- if there's not enough food cards, unfed villagers will starve and die. Aside from that, random events may occur between moons, some of which force your people into battle, and that may also result in their demise. Either way, should you run out of people cards at any moment, the game ends. It's easy to understand in theory, but Stacklands teaches little and forces the player to learn everything from experience, making the early game rocky. And that is but the first of its problems.
What could have been an outstanding game is merely fine, thanks to some questionable design choices and a rough execution. In Stacklands. annoyance is part of the game's mechanics: cards collide with one another and push each other off to the sides, messing up the board and adding some annoying glitches to the mix. Some cards allow for making compact stacks of the same type of card, or guiding your villagers towards certain foods, but those take time and resources to make and only solve part of the problems. Fundamentally, though, the floatiness of the game's objects eliminates their physicality as cards, downgrading Stacklands from an interesting card game to a more generic management one.
There's also a severe lack of quality of life options. If playing on the Steam Deck, you'll immediately feel it in your hands: the controller support is awful, if not on its own, because of glitches stemming from a misuse of Unity's (admittedly terrible) UI navigation system. That the game should not have the Steam Deck Verified seal is a given, but even playing with a mouse, the UI could have been so much more helpful, like by allowing for certain shortcuts, warning about finished tasks, or the presence and position of enemies and the like. It could also provide more guidance, not just in the beginning of the game, but also, when you're about to do something that would, I don't know, summon an incredibly powerful boss that might end your run or something.
On that note, Stacklands should not have had permadeath. Yes, I know card-based roguelikes are all the rage nowadays, but that doesn't mean just any card-adjacent game should have permadeath in it: a full run of Stacklands with the current updates takes upwards of ten hours. Imagine dying to the final boss and having to redo everything -- I almost feel bad for saying Dead Cells had it bad with its deaths. A save option, even if it was a consumable item you had to create with rare materials, would have been welcome.
2022
Do you ever find yourself thinking "What if Obra Dinn and Papers, Please had a child that was really into botany?" No? Well, me neither, to be honest, but maybe we should have, as there's something good in that idea.
In an isolated corner of the town of Undermere stands a small plant shop named the Strange Horticulture. Players take on the role of the owner of that shop, a botanist who spends their days tending to their rare plants and fulfilling clients' requests -- and of course, looking out for the opportunity to acquire new plants. The twist is that no plant that comes into the shopkeeper's hands is labeled: armed with an almanac that loosely describes a variety of plants, as well as a map of the region and their own sharp observational skills, the player must cross-reference information from different sources to deduce the names of each plant.
It's like nothing I've ever seen before, and I can only describe as an inventive subversion of the detective game genre: at the shopkeeper's desk, the player will shuffle plants and papers back and forth in an attempt to adequately label each one, meeting each customer's demand. Multiple tricks are employed along the way, such as plants that have multiple names or deceitful appearances, or clients that aren't explicit about what they want, and each successful identification in face of all those hurdles feels rewarding.
There's more to Strange Horticulture than that, though: the shop will periodically receive cryptic letters and notes, and some of the clients will drop off texts that present challenging puzzles to be deciphered. Furthermore, over the course of the days in which the game takes place, a story will be revealed through the shop's customers, one that begins with a grizzly murder taking place to the north of Undermere and evolves into something ever more sinister.
During some of the in-game days, the player is invited to decide between a couple of possible solutions to the problems they are met with, which ultimately affects the conclusion of an NPC's story or the ending to the game. There's a bit of replayability in exploring those branching paths, even if one happens to get into labeling their plant collection incredibly hard and can name them by heart on a second playthrough, like some people (it's me, I'm people).
As a bonus, despite being designed around a mouse-based interface, it has well-thought out controller support and plays very well on the Steam Deck. Bottom line: Strange Horticulture was a very pleasant surprise, one that delivered from beginning to end. Maybe it won't click for everyone as it did for me, but it definitely warrants a try.
In an isolated corner of the town of Undermere stands a small plant shop named the Strange Horticulture. Players take on the role of the owner of that shop, a botanist who spends their days tending to their rare plants and fulfilling clients' requests -- and of course, looking out for the opportunity to acquire new plants. The twist is that no plant that comes into the shopkeeper's hands is labeled: armed with an almanac that loosely describes a variety of plants, as well as a map of the region and their own sharp observational skills, the player must cross-reference information from different sources to deduce the names of each plant.
It's like nothing I've ever seen before, and I can only describe as an inventive subversion of the detective game genre: at the shopkeeper's desk, the player will shuffle plants and papers back and forth in an attempt to adequately label each one, meeting each customer's demand. Multiple tricks are employed along the way, such as plants that have multiple names or deceitful appearances, or clients that aren't explicit about what they want, and each successful identification in face of all those hurdles feels rewarding.
There's more to Strange Horticulture than that, though: the shop will periodically receive cryptic letters and notes, and some of the clients will drop off texts that present challenging puzzles to be deciphered. Furthermore, over the course of the days in which the game takes place, a story will be revealed through the shop's customers, one that begins with a grizzly murder taking place to the north of Undermere and evolves into something ever more sinister.
During some of the in-game days, the player is invited to decide between a couple of possible solutions to the problems they are met with, which ultimately affects the conclusion of an NPC's story or the ending to the game. There's a bit of replayability in exploring those branching paths, even if one happens to get into labeling their plant collection incredibly hard and can name them by heart on a second playthrough, like some people (it's me, I'm people).
As a bonus, despite being designed around a mouse-based interface, it has well-thought out controller support and plays very well on the Steam Deck. Bottom line: Strange Horticulture was a very pleasant surprise, one that delivered from beginning to end. Maybe it won't click for everyone as it did for me, but it definitely warrants a try.
Years ago, if someone had told me 999 was a name I’d be hearing again over the years, I’d have my doubts about it. The game seemed as niche as can be: It was a visual novel heavy on text and grim undertones that I only ever saw discussed in Japanese games circles. Yet, here we are, with The Nonary Games and Zero Time Dilemma available across a variety of platforms.
I’m unsure how I even came to buy 999. I remember trying it out and having a not so good first impression, then not looking at the game again. I must have seen it on a sale one day and, maybe thinking of giving it a second chance, I brought it home. It remained on my backlog until the day I was looking for a more slow-paced game to play. The day finally came, and gosh, am I ever glad I gave a game a second try.
9 Persons, 9 Hours, 9 Doors, or 999, for short, tells the story of nine people who are kidnapped and trapped on a ship. Their fate is to play the Nonary Game, a perverse and elaborate game that gives them nine hours to go around the ship gathering keys and finding numbered doors in search of an exit, all while their life is on the line.
The first impression is truly bad, mainly because the protagonist, Junpei, is a complete dumbass. he’s one of those dull, “just a normal guy until […]” main characters who are meant to be projected upon and are completely unlikeable as characters. And unlikeable he is, as we spend a bunch of time stuck with him drooling over a female friend who’s also on the ship. Basically, he's male gaze given a name and dialogue box.
Unfortunately, male gaze is a big part of the game. Expect to see impossible boobs and immature jokes, as well as a teenager's idea of romance coming up a lot. There's a Q&A with the author online, and you can tell from that he's not even ashamed of it. Were I to judge the game from the first half an hour, I’d say it was going to be insufferable due to these issues.
Fortunately, however, once we get past the intro, we get less exposed to Junpei’s thoughts and more to the rest of the cast, all of which are much more interesting people than him. Also much more fascinating is the plot of the game, which immediately establishes how high the stakes are, and how horribly everyone will die if they fail the game.
The writing is fantastic. It feels truly novel-like, complete with a very descriptive narrator. This is especially important because of how the game is mostly made up of text and static images. It leaves much more to your imagination, greatly enhancing many of its scenes, especially the more sinister ones. This is an advantage intrinsic to books that visual novels can also make use of.
Unlike their paper counterparts, however, VNs can also make use of sound, and the sound design in 999 reinforces its writing very well. The sound of stepping on metal floors, threading on grimy floors, doors opening, the ship creaking… To say nothing of the excellent soundtrack, which not only appears during cutscenes, but is played during puzzle sections as well.
The gameplay sections in 999 take place in escape rooms. As the game goes on, you’ll be asked to choose doors to go through, and each time you do, Junpei and the characters that accompanied him get trapped into a room and have to find and combine various items to solve puzzles and exit the room.
I like how the difficulty of these sections sits in a nice, comfortable place. The game rewards thoroughness instead of jumping to crazy conclusions, so it’s unlikely you’ll end up in the same situations as in, say, Phoenix Wright, where a very specific item must be used on a specific person because that can incite a reaction you couldn’t possibly know about. In 999, so long as you’re a careful observer, the solution will always be in your grasp.
The escape rooms are half the fun of the game, and it’s great how, the way the endings are laid out, you’ll explore most of the rooms to get them all (only one is technically skippable). This proves to be a double-edged sword when it comes to the endings, however, since they’re mostly decided by your choice of doors.
Picking a door is essentially a blind choice, and even in hindsight it’s hard to figure out by yourself why the game ends in certain ways if you take certain paths. I was lucky to find the true ending path by accident, but a friend missed it by a room and was met with a seemingly inevitable fate, which frustrated him. To me, it was pretty logical why that happened, but I happened to know something he couldn’t have.
This is, of course, a moot point in The Nonary Games, which fixed this issue by having a flowchart and adding the ability to skip back and forth in the game. In the DS version, you kinda need a guide to make sure you don’t waste a bunch of time getting repeat endings.
Regardless of the version you play on, the twist that leads to the true ending, and the fact that you cannot get that ending on your first try, is some of the most amazing video game storytelling I’ve seen. 999 is the kind of narrative that you can only create in a videogame, nowhere else.
I might have my gripes with 999, but it stands that it was a fantastic experience, both story and gameplay-wise. The original DS version, which is what I played, might be hard to locate nowadays, but fortunately, the game is available on the Nonary Games collection, which I recommend picking up wholeheartedly. Always nice to see these games preserved somehow.
(Back to the Q&A with the author, it caught me by surprise how the author justified Lotus’s outfit with “she likes it” (Q8) and insisted her breasts are not implants, they’re “all natural” (Q70). Sheesh. Could he really not have made up a better excuse? The game establishes she’s out of a job, so why didn’t he say “she’s working part-time as a dancer” instead of digging an even bigger hole? The woman has two daughters to feed, has bills to pay, I would have bought it. And what’s so important about a character’s breasts being implants or not?
This juvenile attitude coming from an otherwise very capable writer is so emblematic of the boys’ club mentality pervasive in the gaming industry, it’s sickening.)
I’m unsure how I even came to buy 999. I remember trying it out and having a not so good first impression, then not looking at the game again. I must have seen it on a sale one day and, maybe thinking of giving it a second chance, I brought it home. It remained on my backlog until the day I was looking for a more slow-paced game to play. The day finally came, and gosh, am I ever glad I gave a game a second try.
9 Persons, 9 Hours, 9 Doors, or 999, for short, tells the story of nine people who are kidnapped and trapped on a ship. Their fate is to play the Nonary Game, a perverse and elaborate game that gives them nine hours to go around the ship gathering keys and finding numbered doors in search of an exit, all while their life is on the line.
The first impression is truly bad, mainly because the protagonist, Junpei, is a complete dumbass. he’s one of those dull, “just a normal guy until […]” main characters who are meant to be projected upon and are completely unlikeable as characters. And unlikeable he is, as we spend a bunch of time stuck with him drooling over a female friend who’s also on the ship. Basically, he's male gaze given a name and dialogue box.
Unfortunately, male gaze is a big part of the game. Expect to see impossible boobs and immature jokes, as well as a teenager's idea of romance coming up a lot. There's a Q&A with the author online, and you can tell from that he's not even ashamed of it. Were I to judge the game from the first half an hour, I’d say it was going to be insufferable due to these issues.
Fortunately, however, once we get past the intro, we get less exposed to Junpei’s thoughts and more to the rest of the cast, all of which are much more interesting people than him. Also much more fascinating is the plot of the game, which immediately establishes how high the stakes are, and how horribly everyone will die if they fail the game.
The writing is fantastic. It feels truly novel-like, complete with a very descriptive narrator. This is especially important because of how the game is mostly made up of text and static images. It leaves much more to your imagination, greatly enhancing many of its scenes, especially the more sinister ones. This is an advantage intrinsic to books that visual novels can also make use of.
Unlike their paper counterparts, however, VNs can also make use of sound, and the sound design in 999 reinforces its writing very well. The sound of stepping on metal floors, threading on grimy floors, doors opening, the ship creaking… To say nothing of the excellent soundtrack, which not only appears during cutscenes, but is played during puzzle sections as well.
The gameplay sections in 999 take place in escape rooms. As the game goes on, you’ll be asked to choose doors to go through, and each time you do, Junpei and the characters that accompanied him get trapped into a room and have to find and combine various items to solve puzzles and exit the room.
I like how the difficulty of these sections sits in a nice, comfortable place. The game rewards thoroughness instead of jumping to crazy conclusions, so it’s unlikely you’ll end up in the same situations as in, say, Phoenix Wright, where a very specific item must be used on a specific person because that can incite a reaction you couldn’t possibly know about. In 999, so long as you’re a careful observer, the solution will always be in your grasp.
The escape rooms are half the fun of the game, and it’s great how, the way the endings are laid out, you’ll explore most of the rooms to get them all (only one is technically skippable). This proves to be a double-edged sword when it comes to the endings, however, since they’re mostly decided by your choice of doors.
Picking a door is essentially a blind choice, and even in hindsight it’s hard to figure out by yourself why the game ends in certain ways if you take certain paths. I was lucky to find the true ending path by accident, but a friend missed it by a room and was met with a seemingly inevitable fate, which frustrated him. To me, it was pretty logical why that happened, but I happened to know something he couldn’t have.
This is, of course, a moot point in The Nonary Games, which fixed this issue by having a flowchart and adding the ability to skip back and forth in the game. In the DS version, you kinda need a guide to make sure you don’t waste a bunch of time getting repeat endings.
Regardless of the version you play on, the twist that leads to the true ending, and the fact that you cannot get that ending on your first try, is some of the most amazing video game storytelling I’ve seen. 999 is the kind of narrative that you can only create in a videogame, nowhere else.
I might have my gripes with 999, but it stands that it was a fantastic experience, both story and gameplay-wise. The original DS version, which is what I played, might be hard to locate nowadays, but fortunately, the game is available on the Nonary Games collection, which I recommend picking up wholeheartedly. Always nice to see these games preserved somehow.
(Back to the Q&A with the author, it caught me by surprise how the author justified Lotus’s outfit with “she likes it” (Q8) and insisted her breasts are not implants, they’re “all natural” (Q70). Sheesh. Could he really not have made up a better excuse? The game establishes she’s out of a job, so why didn’t he say “she’s working part-time as a dancer” instead of digging an even bigger hole? The woman has two daughters to feed, has bills to pay, I would have bought it. And what’s so important about a character’s breasts being implants or not?
This juvenile attitude coming from an otherwise very capable writer is so emblematic of the boys’ club mentality pervasive in the gaming industry, it’s sickening.)
2001
Mega Man X6 is what you would get if you took the bad parts of X5 as the standard for a new game and then half-assed the whole thing. Which is, in fact, more or less what happened: The game is a sequel to what was supposed to be the series finale, and was rushed out in order to make a christmas release date and milk the series just a tad bit further while the PS2 gained an install base.
Not that it takes someone telling you that the game was rushed to realize it. X6 is a further visual downgrade from X5, and is home to the most garish pixel art I've ever seen in a high-profile franchise. Sprites have bad shading and use visually clashing colors, much like what you'd see in fan modifications back in the day. A lot of the spritework is clearly unfinished and lacks animations, and the character design itself just feels bland and out of place.
That's, of course, what you get from a surface observation. Playing the game is actually much worse, and you get to feel just how little effort was put into developing it. X6 is home to both the worst bosses and worst stages up to this point in the franchise, both areas of the game having been developed without much regard for consistency or balance.
Stage design revolves around cluttering the screen with enemies and/or projectiles, as well as having lots of instant death traps. Plus, almost all stages involve a stupid gimmick that doesn't fit the game and detracts from the experience, such as a randomly assembling the stage from a pool of areas, a cheaply made, artificially difficult miniboss that you have to fight five to six times in a row, or having to hunt for small destructible objects before proceeding. It's all a big joke, and the final stages are the punchline, requiring highly specific loadouts to even get through them.
To further complicate things, nightmare effects take place whenever you exit a stage. For instance, when you leave the fire stage, other stages may have fireballs falling from the sky, and the ice stage makes other stages have ice physics. Of course, of all the things the game spends a good minute explaining, this system isn't one of them, and because a lot of nightmare effects run counter to the stages' "design" (if you can call it that), it makes some infuriating experiences even more frustrating.
It gets worse: there's an optional boss thing going on like the one in X2, but instead of making a plain old door where you go in, kick butt and come out, they make this whole detour of a secret area that's basically a stage within the stage. Except it's no secret at all -- a lot of them are easier to find than the end of the stage itself, so you can end up in this really hard area early in the game entirely by accident. In that regard, it's worth noting that, unlike ANY other Mega Man game, you can get softlocked in X6 stages due to not having a power-up or weapon, being then forced to suicide into picking stage select, which speaks volume about the care given to the level design.
To make things even more foul, there's this gimmick now where every stage has named reploids to rescue, and they permanently die if a certain enemy attacks them before you reach them. This enemy often spawns right next to the reploid, and in one instance, right on top of them, meaning the only way to save these NPCs is often to clairvoyantly kamikaze towards them. If you miss them and they get caught? Well, too bad, you have to load from the last save and restart the stage.
This is not just a completionist thing: the abysmal parts system from X5 is back, except now, parts don't come from bosses, but from those lost reploids, and again, because the stage design often demands specific loadouts, you can get screwed pretty bad if you lose the wrong one to the Nightmare Virus.
These parts, whether they improve damage or movement, are often a stopgap for the armors you get completely sucking. Don't even think about playing normal X because some stages are plain impossible as him. You begin the game with a gimped Falcon Armor and later get to choose between the Blade Armor and Shadow Armor. The latter disables air dashing and special weapons (and is ugly as hell), while the former is marginally better than Falcon, but not by much, and it has this accursed downwards dash that's super easy to trigger on the dualshock d-pad and killed me literal dozens of times when above a gap -- Gaze sends his regards.
Ah yes, Gaze. Let's talk about bosses. X6's Bosses are in at least one of three categories: complete pushovers, tedious or utter abominations. Most of the first eight bosses fall into the first category: they have one or two attacks and are beatable with the buster and your eyes closed. The rest of the eight mavericks, as well as the optional bosses, are also not hard, but they make you wait until they are vulnerable to attack, which drags the fight for a good several minutes.
But the absolute king stuff comes at the end of the game, where there are bosses you have to damage race and/or get insanely lucky in order to beat. Nightmare Mother is a bad joke, a blocky sprite that slides around and spams the screen. And Gaze? The guy literally has the power to lag the game as an attack, and you can hardly damage him without damaging yourself in the same amount. Have fun, and hope the Blade Armor doesn't throw you straight into the pit.
I can rant on this game for a while longer. Stuff like Zero being handwaved back into the plot, or again most powerups being restricted to X. The fact is, every second spent with X6 is time spent in misery. It is a thoroughly terrible game.
Franchises need to end at some point, or at least be rebooted. The fact that the X franchise kept running up to when it got to this is just so heartbreaking for someone who grew up playing the original X. The sickest part? There's still two games to go. And they say X7 is worse than this. I worry for my sanity.
Not that it takes someone telling you that the game was rushed to realize it. X6 is a further visual downgrade from X5, and is home to the most garish pixel art I've ever seen in a high-profile franchise. Sprites have bad shading and use visually clashing colors, much like what you'd see in fan modifications back in the day. A lot of the spritework is clearly unfinished and lacks animations, and the character design itself just feels bland and out of place.
That's, of course, what you get from a surface observation. Playing the game is actually much worse, and you get to feel just how little effort was put into developing it. X6 is home to both the worst bosses and worst stages up to this point in the franchise, both areas of the game having been developed without much regard for consistency or balance.
Stage design revolves around cluttering the screen with enemies and/or projectiles, as well as having lots of instant death traps. Plus, almost all stages involve a stupid gimmick that doesn't fit the game and detracts from the experience, such as a randomly assembling the stage from a pool of areas, a cheaply made, artificially difficult miniboss that you have to fight five to six times in a row, or having to hunt for small destructible objects before proceeding. It's all a big joke, and the final stages are the punchline, requiring highly specific loadouts to even get through them.
To further complicate things, nightmare effects take place whenever you exit a stage. For instance, when you leave the fire stage, other stages may have fireballs falling from the sky, and the ice stage makes other stages have ice physics. Of course, of all the things the game spends a good minute explaining, this system isn't one of them, and because a lot of nightmare effects run counter to the stages' "design" (if you can call it that), it makes some infuriating experiences even more frustrating.
It gets worse: there's an optional boss thing going on like the one in X2, but instead of making a plain old door where you go in, kick butt and come out, they make this whole detour of a secret area that's basically a stage within the stage. Except it's no secret at all -- a lot of them are easier to find than the end of the stage itself, so you can end up in this really hard area early in the game entirely by accident. In that regard, it's worth noting that, unlike ANY other Mega Man game, you can get softlocked in X6 stages due to not having a power-up or weapon, being then forced to suicide into picking stage select, which speaks volume about the care given to the level design.
To make things even more foul, there's this gimmick now where every stage has named reploids to rescue, and they permanently die if a certain enemy attacks them before you reach them. This enemy often spawns right next to the reploid, and in one instance, right on top of them, meaning the only way to save these NPCs is often to clairvoyantly kamikaze towards them. If you miss them and they get caught? Well, too bad, you have to load from the last save and restart the stage.
This is not just a completionist thing: the abysmal parts system from X5 is back, except now, parts don't come from bosses, but from those lost reploids, and again, because the stage design often demands specific loadouts, you can get screwed pretty bad if you lose the wrong one to the Nightmare Virus.
These parts, whether they improve damage or movement, are often a stopgap for the armors you get completely sucking. Don't even think about playing normal X because some stages are plain impossible as him. You begin the game with a gimped Falcon Armor and later get to choose between the Blade Armor and Shadow Armor. The latter disables air dashing and special weapons (and is ugly as hell), while the former is marginally better than Falcon, but not by much, and it has this accursed downwards dash that's super easy to trigger on the dualshock d-pad and killed me literal dozens of times when above a gap -- Gaze sends his regards.
Ah yes, Gaze. Let's talk about bosses. X6's Bosses are in at least one of three categories: complete pushovers, tedious or utter abominations. Most of the first eight bosses fall into the first category: they have one or two attacks and are beatable with the buster and your eyes closed. The rest of the eight mavericks, as well as the optional bosses, are also not hard, but they make you wait until they are vulnerable to attack, which drags the fight for a good several minutes.
But the absolute king stuff comes at the end of the game, where there are bosses you have to damage race and/or get insanely lucky in order to beat. Nightmare Mother is a bad joke, a blocky sprite that slides around and spams the screen. And Gaze? The guy literally has the power to lag the game as an attack, and you can hardly damage him without damaging yourself in the same amount. Have fun, and hope the Blade Armor doesn't throw you straight into the pit.
I can rant on this game for a while longer. Stuff like Zero being handwaved back into the plot, or again most powerups being restricted to X. The fact is, every second spent with X6 is time spent in misery. It is a thoroughly terrible game.
Franchises need to end at some point, or at least be rebooted. The fact that the X franchise kept running up to when it got to this is just so heartbreaking for someone who grew up playing the original X. The sickest part? There's still two games to go. And they say X7 is worse than this. I worry for my sanity.
2013
Ittle Dew originally got my attention not simply due to its cute visuals and tomboy protagonist, but because one look at it was enough to tell it was inspired by The Legend of Zelda. That's a high bar to set for oneself, and I've seen many games that claimed to be like Zelda, but fell short. Upon playing, though, I was delighted to see that Ittle Dew could, indeed, cash that check.
Zelda is a long-time favorite series of mine. Bar the first couple of games (and excluding BotW, which is a different beast), it's a series that's very light on combat mechanics, most of the challenge coming from using your equipment correctly to a) navigate environments and b) solve puzzles. The amount of (a) and (b) varies from game to game, from 2D to 3D, among other things, but in any case, it's that mix that had the series see success for decades. This deceptively simple formula, however, requires great level design to work, which is where a lot of copycats fall short.
As Ittle Dew starts, the eponymous adventurer Ittle Dew and her magic fox Tippsie shipwreck into a mysterious island wherein lies a castle. They start heading inland looking for a way off the island and soon meet Itan Carver, the item salesman. He promises to make them a raft in exchange for an artifact hidden within the castle, and so, our pair sets off to explore it.
The castle is the main dungeon for Ittle Dew, being both the first place you enter and the location of the final boss, however, it's impossible to explore it all in one go without extra equipment. There are three special items in the game: the Fire Sword, the Portal Wand and the Ice Wand, all of which are found in dungeons to which Itan will take you... for a fee. To cover his expenses, you'll need to gather gold from the castle and return to his shop.
And here is the game's most insane twist: Ittle Dew allows you to obtain the items in whatever order you want. Depending on that order, the route through the castle will be completely different, both due to items affecting different parts of the environment, and because of the interactions between their mechanics. More than that, while the game does give you enough gold to buy all three items, it's possible, by finding the correct route, to finish the game with any of the three possible pairs of equipment.
The fun in Ittle Dew is not simply finishing it once, but replaying it and going for a different item combination. It's a mind-bending exercise that forces you to rethink your strategy according to your new set of tools. And make no mistake: the puzzles in Ittle Dew can get outright devilish, requiring the player to think long and hard about what to do. This is especially true for puzzles outside the main dungeons, which are either small caves hiding collectibles, or the two optional endgame dungeons that require the use of all three items to get through. That "Retry Room" in the menu is not there just for show.
This challenging gameplay is accompanied by an extremely charming presentation. Wobbly, colorful graphics make the world look alive, tunes stick to your head for hours after you're done playing, and the cast, while small, is lovable and well realized. Ittle is a nonchalant girl eager for adventure, which plays off of Tippsie's down-to-earthness -- although, to be fair, it's clear that, whatever the fox is drinking, it's not exactly health potions. And Itan, well, let's just say his love for carving goes a bit too far.
Surpassing every expectation and being sold at rather modest price point, I can hardly shower Ittle Dew with enough praise. Far from being a generic, forgettable Zelda-clone, it's a game of its own, building on tried-and-true ideas with fantastic original design. It's not a game for the impatient, nor people looking for action, but if you're willing to sit down and work on some brainteasers, I wholeheartedly recommend it.
Zelda is a long-time favorite series of mine. Bar the first couple of games (and excluding BotW, which is a different beast), it's a series that's very light on combat mechanics, most of the challenge coming from using your equipment correctly to a) navigate environments and b) solve puzzles. The amount of (a) and (b) varies from game to game, from 2D to 3D, among other things, but in any case, it's that mix that had the series see success for decades. This deceptively simple formula, however, requires great level design to work, which is where a lot of copycats fall short.
As Ittle Dew starts, the eponymous adventurer Ittle Dew and her magic fox Tippsie shipwreck into a mysterious island wherein lies a castle. They start heading inland looking for a way off the island and soon meet Itan Carver, the item salesman. He promises to make them a raft in exchange for an artifact hidden within the castle, and so, our pair sets off to explore it.
The castle is the main dungeon for Ittle Dew, being both the first place you enter and the location of the final boss, however, it's impossible to explore it all in one go without extra equipment. There are three special items in the game: the Fire Sword, the Portal Wand and the Ice Wand, all of which are found in dungeons to which Itan will take you... for a fee. To cover his expenses, you'll need to gather gold from the castle and return to his shop.
And here is the game's most insane twist: Ittle Dew allows you to obtain the items in whatever order you want. Depending on that order, the route through the castle will be completely different, both due to items affecting different parts of the environment, and because of the interactions between their mechanics. More than that, while the game does give you enough gold to buy all three items, it's possible, by finding the correct route, to finish the game with any of the three possible pairs of equipment.
The fun in Ittle Dew is not simply finishing it once, but replaying it and going for a different item combination. It's a mind-bending exercise that forces you to rethink your strategy according to your new set of tools. And make no mistake: the puzzles in Ittle Dew can get outright devilish, requiring the player to think long and hard about what to do. This is especially true for puzzles outside the main dungeons, which are either small caves hiding collectibles, or the two optional endgame dungeons that require the use of all three items to get through. That "Retry Room" in the menu is not there just for show.
This challenging gameplay is accompanied by an extremely charming presentation. Wobbly, colorful graphics make the world look alive, tunes stick to your head for hours after you're done playing, and the cast, while small, is lovable and well realized. Ittle is a nonchalant girl eager for adventure, which plays off of Tippsie's down-to-earthness -- although, to be fair, it's clear that, whatever the fox is drinking, it's not exactly health potions. And Itan, well, let's just say his love for carving goes a bit too far.
Surpassing every expectation and being sold at rather modest price point, I can hardly shower Ittle Dew with enough praise. Far from being a generic, forgettable Zelda-clone, it's a game of its own, building on tried-and-true ideas with fantastic original design. It's not a game for the impatient, nor people looking for action, but if you're willing to sit down and work on some brainteasers, I wholeheartedly recommend it.
2000
Full review here. I was surprised to see it released on NSO, and I binged it the day after the direct. It's still as good as ever: the "nothing-kills-you" gimmick, as well as its inventive implementation of metroidvania, makes it one of the most unique platformers you'll find out there.
Just use the Rewind function liberally, alright? For your own sanity.
Just use the Rewind function liberally, alright? For your own sanity.
I remember having a hard time getting into this game at first, I think because Normal difficulty felt way too easy. Then I tried it on Hard, and played over two hundred hours, only stopping when everything in the game was maxed out.
As far as portable RPGs go, this is one of the best. It's easy to put 15 minutes into it, if you feel like it, and it's easy to put 150 hours as well. It's almost perfect. If I could change one simple thing, I would change the speed mechanics. But that's it. I really wish a new entry in this series would show up one day.
As far as portable RPGs go, this is one of the best. It's easy to put 15 minutes into it, if you feel like it, and it's easy to put 150 hours as well. It's almost perfect. If I could change one simple thing, I would change the speed mechanics. But that's it. I really wish a new entry in this series would show up one day.
Taking place a few years after its prequel, Yakuza 6 starts with a small timeskip as Kiryu goes to jail due to the events that transpired in the finale of Y5. Coming back to Morning Glory, he finds Haruka missing, having left to avoid drawing negative attention to the other kids in the orphanage. Kiryu immediately sets out to find his daughter, and to his surprise, finds out that she now has a son of her own, a young boy that's tied to a decades-old underworld conspiracy.
Yakuza 6 was a very positive surprise. After the CIA, rubber bullets and... whatever the heck went on in the fever dream that was Yakuza 5, Y6 feels refreshing, with a plot that's incredibly convoluted, as per series standards, but where the pieces nevertheless fall beautifully into place, each part of the conspiracy leading into the other in a way that feels almost inevitable. Plus, it features a large and incredibly well-realized cast, each character having layered personalities and motivations: Nagumo, Kiyomi, Hirose, Someya, Yuuta, Han-Joon-Gi and more are some of the best the series has seen. Overall, I would risk saying this is the best Yakuza storyline since 0 (series' chronology wise).
One aspect that's often brought up as a criticism is that RGG went back to having only one character, down from the whopping five in Yakuza 5, but it's clear that, for the story they wanted to tell, and the conclusion they wanted to have, paving the way for Yagami and Ichiban to take over as series' leads, there was no way to not have the story focus on Kiryu. That intent is clear from the game's cover: like previous entries, Yakuza 6 establishes its themes right from the game's subtitle, which the Western localization was kind enough to keep this time around: The Song of Life. The old being replaced by the new. Younger generations taking over and doing things their own way. Parents, their children and their grandchildren. Focusing the story on Kiryu and his family allowed the writers to amplify this message in a way that the multiple protagonist setup would just not have been able to.
And it's not only the characters of Kiryu, Haruka and Haruto reflect that cycle at the core of the game's storytelling: so does the city of Kamurocho, which feels exceptionally hostile this time around. For one, people now walk around with all sorts of gadgets that our nearly 50-year-old protagonist struggles to wrap his head around. But more than the people, the city itself has transformed, more of it having been swallowed by large companies and criminal enterprises, large hotels, gyms, food chains and whatnot now standing where once stood familiar locations. Of note is that Little Asia is entirely gone, and one can't help but wonder what happened to all those people from Y4. The game never explains, of course, because that's just how it is: folks are pushed out and the city moves on, cold and unfeeling.
Kamurocho is contrasted with Onomichi, the countryside town in Hiroshima that Kiryu is eventually led by the story, which presents a much more traditional Japanese town, where life is simpler and time moves more slowly. Both locations feel even better in the Dragon Engine, which allows for more detail and makes the urban landscapes shine at night. As per the series' standards, both areas also feature a myriad side activities, many of the latter being unique to Yakuza 6, like the Cat Café, Spearfishing, the Snack Bar, the baseball team, and so on. Not to mention, the substories are top-notch, as per usual -- I mentioned Kiryu's struggles with technology, as that's a focus of some of my favorite substories. Most of the other quests have that wholesome flavor to them that's a trademark of the series and that feels intensely satisfying.
What might feel lackluster at first is the game's combat, which, like in Kiwami 2, was a bit dialed down compared to the previous game (again, chronology-wise). Indeed, Kiryu has a much leaner moveset in this entry, but I'd use that exact word to describe Y6's combat: lean. It limits itself to the more fundamental aspects of the franchise gameplay, which means it's less flashy, but still very functional. The game feels great in the moment-to-moment action, so long as you can let go of expecting the exact systems from previous games. In fact, in some cases, this reset feels better: I actually had fun fighting Amon this time around, whereas his gimmicky Y5 incarnation made me want to eat my controller.
Saying goodbye to Kiryu, Haruka and so many others feels bittersweet after hundreds of hours spent with them over the last few years, but I'm glad their farewell has done justice to them. More than that, the way Yakuza 6 is an embodiment of so many of the franchise's qualities makes me incredibly excited for Yakuza 7, Judgment and all the other games I have yet to play.
Yakuza 6 was a very positive surprise. After the CIA, rubber bullets and... whatever the heck went on in the fever dream that was Yakuza 5, Y6 feels refreshing, with a plot that's incredibly convoluted, as per series standards, but where the pieces nevertheless fall beautifully into place, each part of the conspiracy leading into the other in a way that feels almost inevitable. Plus, it features a large and incredibly well-realized cast, each character having layered personalities and motivations: Nagumo, Kiyomi, Hirose, Someya, Yuuta, Han-Joon-Gi and more are some of the best the series has seen. Overall, I would risk saying this is the best Yakuza storyline since 0 (series' chronology wise).
One aspect that's often brought up as a criticism is that RGG went back to having only one character, down from the whopping five in Yakuza 5, but it's clear that, for the story they wanted to tell, and the conclusion they wanted to have, paving the way for Yagami and Ichiban to take over as series' leads, there was no way to not have the story focus on Kiryu. That intent is clear from the game's cover: like previous entries, Yakuza 6 establishes its themes right from the game's subtitle, which the Western localization was kind enough to keep this time around: The Song of Life. The old being replaced by the new. Younger generations taking over and doing things their own way. Parents, their children and their grandchildren. Focusing the story on Kiryu and his family allowed the writers to amplify this message in a way that the multiple protagonist setup would just not have been able to.
And it's not only the characters of Kiryu, Haruka and Haruto reflect that cycle at the core of the game's storytelling: so does the city of Kamurocho, which feels exceptionally hostile this time around. For one, people now walk around with all sorts of gadgets that our nearly 50-year-old protagonist struggles to wrap his head around. But more than the people, the city itself has transformed, more of it having been swallowed by large companies and criminal enterprises, large hotels, gyms, food chains and whatnot now standing where once stood familiar locations. Of note is that Little Asia is entirely gone, and one can't help but wonder what happened to all those people from Y4. The game never explains, of course, because that's just how it is: folks are pushed out and the city moves on, cold and unfeeling.
Kamurocho is contrasted with Onomichi, the countryside town in Hiroshima that Kiryu is eventually led by the story, which presents a much more traditional Japanese town, where life is simpler and time moves more slowly. Both locations feel even better in the Dragon Engine, which allows for more detail and makes the urban landscapes shine at night. As per the series' standards, both areas also feature a myriad side activities, many of the latter being unique to Yakuza 6, like the Cat Café, Spearfishing, the Snack Bar, the baseball team, and so on. Not to mention, the substories are top-notch, as per usual -- I mentioned Kiryu's struggles with technology, as that's a focus of some of my favorite substories. Most of the other quests have that wholesome flavor to them that's a trademark of the series and that feels intensely satisfying.
What might feel lackluster at first is the game's combat, which, like in Kiwami 2, was a bit dialed down compared to the previous game (again, chronology-wise). Indeed, Kiryu has a much leaner moveset in this entry, but I'd use that exact word to describe Y6's combat: lean. It limits itself to the more fundamental aspects of the franchise gameplay, which means it's less flashy, but still very functional. The game feels great in the moment-to-moment action, so long as you can let go of expecting the exact systems from previous games. In fact, in some cases, this reset feels better: I actually had fun fighting Amon this time around, whereas his gimmicky Y5 incarnation made me want to eat my controller.
Saying goodbye to Kiryu, Haruka and so many others feels bittersweet after hundreds of hours spent with them over the last few years, but I'm glad their farewell has done justice to them. More than that, the way Yakuza 6 is an embodiment of so many of the franchise's qualities makes me incredibly excited for Yakuza 7, Judgment and all the other games I have yet to play.
2021
You cut the tape with my stanley knife and we unpack our life ♫
Moving is scary -- not only is it a lot of work, it's usually the sign of a big change taking place, and depending on the nature of that change, the move can come with feelings of anticipation and excitement just as much as bitterness or melancholy. In that midst, we pack up our things, an act that. as repetitive as it may be, carries with it a lot of introspection. As we take down shelves and empty out closets, we discover objects we might not even remember: pictures, lost belongings, keepsakes from important events, obsessions from other times... we see parts of ourselves expressed not only in the things we find, but in the ones we decide are important enough to keep with us on our new journey.
Unpacking turns all of this into a narrative framework. The game has you unpacking boxes of a woman, from her early childhood to well into her adult life, every time she moves houses. The goal is to place her things around the new house in appropriate places. In gameplay terms, these are observation-based puzzles where you try to figure what the purpose of an item probably is and where this person would reasonably place it within this new house. Sometimes, objects are packed in boxes for the wrong room, and sometimes, they come out of left field and need a bit more context from other stuff from the move.
It's an endearing gameplay loop that sets the relaxed pace in which the game takes place, the boxes slowly disappearing as the player makes the house more lively. It also serves as the perfect framing for the star of the show, which is the story being told with next to no text through the different locations and belongings. To go any deeper into this would be to spoil parts of the game, but it's a fascinating experience to know so much about the health problems, relationships, food preferences, all these details about the life of a person you don't know the name or face of.
It's why, for my part, Unpacking is just a blanket recommendation: A novel and approachable game that tells a story in a way no media other than gaming probably could manage, with a phenomenal amount of emotion to boot.
Moving is scary -- not only is it a lot of work, it's usually the sign of a big change taking place, and depending on the nature of that change, the move can come with feelings of anticipation and excitement just as much as bitterness or melancholy. In that midst, we pack up our things, an act that. as repetitive as it may be, carries with it a lot of introspection. As we take down shelves and empty out closets, we discover objects we might not even remember: pictures, lost belongings, keepsakes from important events, obsessions from other times... we see parts of ourselves expressed not only in the things we find, but in the ones we decide are important enough to keep with us on our new journey.
Unpacking turns all of this into a narrative framework. The game has you unpacking boxes of a woman, from her early childhood to well into her adult life, every time she moves houses. The goal is to place her things around the new house in appropriate places. In gameplay terms, these are observation-based puzzles where you try to figure what the purpose of an item probably is and where this person would reasonably place it within this new house. Sometimes, objects are packed in boxes for the wrong room, and sometimes, they come out of left field and need a bit more context from other stuff from the move.
It's an endearing gameplay loop that sets the relaxed pace in which the game takes place, the boxes slowly disappearing as the player makes the house more lively. It also serves as the perfect framing for the star of the show, which is the story being told with next to no text through the different locations and belongings. To go any deeper into this would be to spoil parts of the game, but it's a fascinating experience to know so much about the health problems, relationships, food preferences, all these details about the life of a person you don't know the name or face of.
It's why, for my part, Unpacking is just a blanket recommendation: A novel and approachable game that tells a story in a way no media other than gaming probably could manage, with a phenomenal amount of emotion to boot.
2023
With the runaway success of Vampire Survivors, multiple clones of that game are being released, some of them made due to a legitimate love for the original, but for the most part, it's just studios following the money. Regardless of intent, those clones are at best, decent reimaginings with not much special going for them, and at worst, mockeries, adding copious amounts of grinding and/or predatory monetization systems, thus ruining the low commitment fun of the original. Halls of Torment is the first one I've seen that not only plays great, but also, by incorporating multiple new ideas, feels like a natural evolution of the nascent genre.
This might not be evident at first: like VS, Halls of Torment features quest-based progression: completing certain objectives and milestones during stages is rewarded with unlocks of items, characters and mechanics. However, it starts even slower than its inspiration, and at first, it might feel like it has not much going for it. As new traits, abilities and especially characters are unlocked, the game's unique spark begins to show. There's a great many ways to play the game: each class is unique and encourages -- but doesn't force -- certain choices of skills and traits, all of which feel different from one another.
Halls of Torment seeks to recreate the magic of old-school ARPGs, like the first Diablo games, and this goes further than its amazing recreation of pre-rendered visuals from the time. In fact, a lot of players have left Steam reviews calling HoT "the real Diablo IV", and while it's obviously tongue-in-cheek, it's easy to see how much better HoT is at ticking certain ARPG boxes than that game: it's about making a little guy with relative freedom to build them however one wants, collecting items with unique gimmicks, slaying hordes of demons that culminate in challenging bosses with actual fight mechanics...
It does all that with approachable dual stick controls and intuitive combat mechanics, and most importantly, respecting the players' time: runs last for at most 30 minutes, and completing the game in its current state will take around 20 hours. It's still only about 60% done, though, so if you're the type to binge this sort of game, maybe hold off until it's out of early access to dive in.
This might not be evident at first: like VS, Halls of Torment features quest-based progression: completing certain objectives and milestones during stages is rewarded with unlocks of items, characters and mechanics. However, it starts even slower than its inspiration, and at first, it might feel like it has not much going for it. As new traits, abilities and especially characters are unlocked, the game's unique spark begins to show. There's a great many ways to play the game: each class is unique and encourages -- but doesn't force -- certain choices of skills and traits, all of which feel different from one another.
Halls of Torment seeks to recreate the magic of old-school ARPGs, like the first Diablo games, and this goes further than its amazing recreation of pre-rendered visuals from the time. In fact, a lot of players have left Steam reviews calling HoT "the real Diablo IV", and while it's obviously tongue-in-cheek, it's easy to see how much better HoT is at ticking certain ARPG boxes than that game: it's about making a little guy with relative freedom to build them however one wants, collecting items with unique gimmicks, slaying hordes of demons that culminate in challenging bosses with actual fight mechanics...
It does all that with approachable dual stick controls and intuitive combat mechanics, and most importantly, respecting the players' time: runs last for at most 30 minutes, and completing the game in its current state will take around 20 hours. It's still only about 60% done, though, so if you're the type to binge this sort of game, maybe hold off until it's out of early access to dive in.
The conclusion of the Ezio trilogy is still pretty fun, but by this point, the cracks were starting to show. The rush to make yearly releases and grow the franchise ever more meant that this, the game preceding ACIII, showed clear signs of being rushed. And it's only downhill from here.
I can see how this is often considered an improvement over the prequel Joins The Parade, but the result, to me, feels more like a weaker Freddi Fish than a Putt-Putt game. The game is much more direct about its puzzles this time around, puzzles that don't have many steps and sometimes you'll even get the answer straight up spelled out to you. Plus, there's less interesting stuff to do in the world, which feels a lot more obtuse due to being based on space unlike the more grounded Cartown.
"Veil Tear"? For real? BioWare, I came here to hunt a witch!
Sigh... Once again, the Warden sets out to do a thing and ends up babysitting a bunch of forgettable characters with bad builds. This time around, our party is composed of some elf, some mage and a Mabari hound, which may or may not be the same dog from the campaign. At least, this time around, their quest is something important to the Warden: finding out where Morrigan went after the defeat of the Archdemon.
It's the only reason why I'm willing to give it a pass, even though it has more or less the same issues as the rest of the DLC packs: short, buggy, does not include the original cast and is filled with busywork and poorly put together encounters. Also, the final conversation with Morrigan doesn't really provide any answers, but instead just vaguely teases events one can only hope get resolved in Inquisition.
By the Maker, it's amazing how low the bar for DLC was for Dragon Age.
Sigh... Once again, the Warden sets out to do a thing and ends up babysitting a bunch of forgettable characters with bad builds. This time around, our party is composed of some elf, some mage and a Mabari hound, which may or may not be the same dog from the campaign. At least, this time around, their quest is something important to the Warden: finding out where Morrigan went after the defeat of the Archdemon.
It's the only reason why I'm willing to give it a pass, even though it has more or less the same issues as the rest of the DLC packs: short, buggy, does not include the original cast and is filled with busywork and poorly put together encounters. Also, the final conversation with Morrigan doesn't really provide any answers, but instead just vaguely teases events one can only hope get resolved in Inquisition.
By the Maker, it's amazing how low the bar for DLC was for Dragon Age.
Rondo of Blood is included in the Castlevania Requiem collection, which I bought for the sake of playing SoTN. I'm not fond of the series pre-Igavania, and I went into Rondo of Blood out of curiosity, expecting to loathe playing it. In the end, I was positively surprised. I often hear it being considered the best traditional Castlevania, and while I'm still not that fond of it, I can see what those people are saying.
Okay, let's get the ugly part out of the way: controlling the playable character feels like controlling a brick. Jumping controls feel stilted, while attack animations are long and stick you in place. Basic action-platformer stuff, like landing on a narrow platform, turning around to attack or jumping in to attack an enemy are made incredibly tough in Rondo of Blood. To make it worse, characters suffer lengthy knockback animations when damaged, after which there are no iframes and you're likely to get hit again.
The game has two playable characters, Richter and Maria, and everyone will tell you to switch to Maria as soon as she's unlocked since, while not free from the game's issues, her moveset features a more flexible default attack, a double jump and a slide move, which beats Richter by a mile. I guess she might have been an experiment with breaking off from traditional series mechanics, but I haven't played CV3 with its multiple characters, so I wouldn't know how much of a step forward she is.
But yes, in terms of character control and playability, the game feels like it's behind many platformers that came before it, and SoTN, which came right after it. And that is weird, because that's the only way in which the game feels particularly dated. Everything else seems pretty smartly designed: for instance, enemies and bosses all have well-telegraphed attacks and discernible patterns you can learn. There are some cheap enemy placements here and there, but I couldn't name any cheap enemies.
Plus, the game features intricate level design: stages are complex and have multiple paths you can take to the end, and in some cases, multiple bosses. The "world map" itself, so to speak, also features more than one path you can take to get to Dracula's Castle. And none of it is the bullcrap kind of secret that requires a guide, it's all possible to find on your own.
Ultimately, playing Rondo of Blood was an interesting trip into video game history, and while it's not my style of game, I can appreciate what it does and I can see how it would please people with certain affinities.
Okay, let's get the ugly part out of the way: controlling the playable character feels like controlling a brick. Jumping controls feel stilted, while attack animations are long and stick you in place. Basic action-platformer stuff, like landing on a narrow platform, turning around to attack or jumping in to attack an enemy are made incredibly tough in Rondo of Blood. To make it worse, characters suffer lengthy knockback animations when damaged, after which there are no iframes and you're likely to get hit again.
The game has two playable characters, Richter and Maria, and everyone will tell you to switch to Maria as soon as she's unlocked since, while not free from the game's issues, her moveset features a more flexible default attack, a double jump and a slide move, which beats Richter by a mile. I guess she might have been an experiment with breaking off from traditional series mechanics, but I haven't played CV3 with its multiple characters, so I wouldn't know how much of a step forward she is.
But yes, in terms of character control and playability, the game feels like it's behind many platformers that came before it, and SoTN, which came right after it. And that is weird, because that's the only way in which the game feels particularly dated. Everything else seems pretty smartly designed: for instance, enemies and bosses all have well-telegraphed attacks and discernible patterns you can learn. There are some cheap enemy placements here and there, but I couldn't name any cheap enemies.
Plus, the game features intricate level design: stages are complex and have multiple paths you can take to the end, and in some cases, multiple bosses. The "world map" itself, so to speak, also features more than one path you can take to get to Dracula's Castle. And none of it is the bullcrap kind of secret that requires a guide, it's all possible to find on your own.
Ultimately, playing Rondo of Blood was an interesting trip into video game history, and while it's not my style of game, I can appreciate what it does and I can see how it would please people with certain affinities.
Yay for more cut content! Return to Ostagar is a DLC featuring a very short level -- the shortest of all DLC packs bar maybe The Golems of Amgarrak -- featuring important development for some of the party (provided you bring the correct people) as well as overpowered equipment that can be used to make cheese builds later on. It's...fine, and better existing as DLC than not at all, but it hits as something that should have been in the main game and serves as a perfect example of how bizarre EA's strategy with Dragon Age: Origins was.