Lucca202
BACKER
2022
We're all Replikas, after all. In the end, what's one drop to an ocean? When I die, they'll just make another.
The horror genre is home to some of gaming's best stories and storytelling... sometimes. The genre is known for some brilliant works that confront us with all sorts of anxieties stemming to our human existence: the fear of death, of the other, of the unknown, of losing one's memory, or the integrity of one's body and mind, to name a few. Games like Silent Hill 2 are called classics because of how masterfully they pull the player into this turmoil of emotions felt by its characters, tying that to the horror seen on-screen. Yes, the guy with the triangular hat is scary, but he is also a manifestation of something far more dire -- and more real -- than a man with a big knife and dirty clothes.
Alas, the genre is often found diluted by other influences that detract a bit from the horror. Games that focus too much on the combat and/or and the shooting, or in the momentaneous scares instead of the overall experience, or in being youtube-bait with loud noises and hideous, incongruent visuals. Again, quality will vary among all of these, it's not that they're necessarily bad, but it's only every few years that we get one of those horror gems that trap us in an unrelenting atmosphere of dread, yet make us reach for more with each second.
Signalis is such a gem.
ACHTUNG! ACHTUNG! 39486 60170 24326 01064
Coming out of absolutely nowhere, the game was developed by rose-engine, a duo of game developers living in Germany. It takes place in a distant future, in a part of the galaxy ruled by a dystopian regime, and where Replikas, androids whose different models aid humans in their tasks, exist in large numbers. You take on the role of one such Replika named Elster, who awakens alone in her ship and heads to the S-23 Sierpinski mining facility in search of her partner, Ariane.
To go any deeper into the setting would be to spoil it, as part of the beauty of the game is how it uses character diaries and environmental storytelling to slowly unveil what happened to the people of this world. More than that, there's a dream-like quality to the game's sequences that gradually evolves into a horrifying nightmare, the world around Elster making ever less sense as she stoically pushes forward on her mission, and that is better experienced than read about. All I can say is that, while some accuse the game of being too vague, beneath the nightmarish visions and seeming discontinuities, there's a complete and heartfelt story being told that the more attentive players will be able to piece together.
It's like everything was taken apart and put back together by someone who doesn't understand how any of it works.
Gameplay takes place in a top-down fashion and borrows a lot from retro horror games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, down to the puzzles and inventory management (and optionally, tank controls). Signalis toys with its players through its mechanics, offering them a variety of guns but little ammo to shoot from them, plenty of healing items you can't fit in your low inventory space, and an aiming system that forces you to wait for a good shot as enemies slowly enclose you. True to its survival horror nature, it's a game that punishes those who try to approach it as an action game, hoarding every item and recklessly engaging enemies, in a way that's beautiful to witness.
It's easy to take a superficial look at Signalis and say it's a copy of classic games, but that's not remotely true. For instance, rather than confusing cheap visuals for retro, the game presents itself in an impressive, carefully put together artstyle that meshes low-fi assets and low-precision geometry with more modern tech, such as dynamic lighting and a variety of custom shader effects, in a way that feels striking and original. Looking further than just visuals, though, Signalis's influences go far beyond just those two games I mentioned -- in fact, it goes far beyond just games, and almost warrants a bibliography. There's touches of Ghost in the Shell, Alien and Evangelion; there's references to biblical works as well as Lovecraft stories such as The Whisperer in Darkness, and The King In Yellow is more than an influence, it's a motif that makes frequent appearances throughout the story.
And all of it comes together to form an authentic, enticing whole, with the wealth of themes developed over the course of the experience being remarkable for a game with under ten hours of runtime. Propelled by its ideas of Replikas and Bioresonance, as well as its surreal hellscapes, Signalis paints a harrowing picture of existence in this distant, dystopian age where reality has stopped making sense, tipping its brush in themes of love and loss; of humanity, guilt and insanity; of memory, oblivion and identity. What makes you, you, and how much of it would you have to lose to stop being you? How much does the trauma we suffer change us? How far would you go for someone who is dear to you, and when does that love go too far?
And in those days, people will seek death, and they will not find it.
If you're a fan of survival horror games, Signalis should be at the top of your list for 2022 -- in fact, if you're in that group, I would recommend playing on Survival difficulty outright, as it makes the game's stakes even higher. Even if you aren't a fan of the genre, though, if you can put up with a few scares, the storytelling, visuals and overall experience contained within it are hard to miss. Signalis is a beautiful game that will make you uneasy at every turn – then have you wishing for more when it's over.
The horror genre is home to some of gaming's best stories and storytelling... sometimes. The genre is known for some brilliant works that confront us with all sorts of anxieties stemming to our human existence: the fear of death, of the other, of the unknown, of losing one's memory, or the integrity of one's body and mind, to name a few. Games like Silent Hill 2 are called classics because of how masterfully they pull the player into this turmoil of emotions felt by its characters, tying that to the horror seen on-screen. Yes, the guy with the triangular hat is scary, but he is also a manifestation of something far more dire -- and more real -- than a man with a big knife and dirty clothes.
Alas, the genre is often found diluted by other influences that detract a bit from the horror. Games that focus too much on the combat and/or and the shooting, or in the momentaneous scares instead of the overall experience, or in being youtube-bait with loud noises and hideous, incongruent visuals. Again, quality will vary among all of these, it's not that they're necessarily bad, but it's only every few years that we get one of those horror gems that trap us in an unrelenting atmosphere of dread, yet make us reach for more with each second.
Signalis is such a gem.
ACHTUNG! ACHTUNG! 39486 60170 24326 01064
Coming out of absolutely nowhere, the game was developed by rose-engine, a duo of game developers living in Germany. It takes place in a distant future, in a part of the galaxy ruled by a dystopian regime, and where Replikas, androids whose different models aid humans in their tasks, exist in large numbers. You take on the role of one such Replika named Elster, who awakens alone in her ship and heads to the S-23 Sierpinski mining facility in search of her partner, Ariane.
To go any deeper into the setting would be to spoil it, as part of the beauty of the game is how it uses character diaries and environmental storytelling to slowly unveil what happened to the people of this world. More than that, there's a dream-like quality to the game's sequences that gradually evolves into a horrifying nightmare, the world around Elster making ever less sense as she stoically pushes forward on her mission, and that is better experienced than read about. All I can say is that, while some accuse the game of being too vague, beneath the nightmarish visions and seeming discontinuities, there's a complete and heartfelt story being told that the more attentive players will be able to piece together.
It's like everything was taken apart and put back together by someone who doesn't understand how any of it works.
Gameplay takes place in a top-down fashion and borrows a lot from retro horror games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, down to the puzzles and inventory management (and optionally, tank controls). Signalis toys with its players through its mechanics, offering them a variety of guns but little ammo to shoot from them, plenty of healing items you can't fit in your low inventory space, and an aiming system that forces you to wait for a good shot as enemies slowly enclose you. True to its survival horror nature, it's a game that punishes those who try to approach it as an action game, hoarding every item and recklessly engaging enemies, in a way that's beautiful to witness.
It's easy to take a superficial look at Signalis and say it's a copy of classic games, but that's not remotely true. For instance, rather than confusing cheap visuals for retro, the game presents itself in an impressive, carefully put together artstyle that meshes low-fi assets and low-precision geometry with more modern tech, such as dynamic lighting and a variety of custom shader effects, in a way that feels striking and original. Looking further than just visuals, though, Signalis's influences go far beyond just those two games I mentioned -- in fact, it goes far beyond just games, and almost warrants a bibliography. There's touches of Ghost in the Shell, Alien and Evangelion; there's references to biblical works as well as Lovecraft stories such as The Whisperer in Darkness, and The King In Yellow is more than an influence, it's a motif that makes frequent appearances throughout the story.
And all of it comes together to form an authentic, enticing whole, with the wealth of themes developed over the course of the experience being remarkable for a game with under ten hours of runtime. Propelled by its ideas of Replikas and Bioresonance, as well as its surreal hellscapes, Signalis paints a harrowing picture of existence in this distant, dystopian age where reality has stopped making sense, tipping its brush in themes of love and loss; of humanity, guilt and insanity; of memory, oblivion and identity. What makes you, you, and how much of it would you have to lose to stop being you? How much does the trauma we suffer change us? How far would you go for someone who is dear to you, and when does that love go too far?
And in those days, people will seek death, and they will not find it.
If you're a fan of survival horror games, Signalis should be at the top of your list for 2022 -- in fact, if you're in that group, I would recommend playing on Survival difficulty outright, as it makes the game's stakes even higher. Even if you aren't a fan of the genre, though, if you can put up with a few scares, the storytelling, visuals and overall experience contained within it are hard to miss. Signalis is a beautiful game that will make you uneasy at every turn – then have you wishing for more when it's over.
1995
In case you didn’t notice it from my username, I love Chrono Trigger. It’s one of the most memorable games from my childhood, a standout RPG that left such a powerful impression on me that playing it nowadays still brings me chills.
This review contains spoilers for the first few hours of the game.
Originally released for the SNES in 1995, Chrono Trigger is an RPG developed by Squaresoft, way before its merger with Enix created Square-Enix. The game’s production was kickstarted by a trio dubbed the “Dream Team”, consisting of Final Fantasy’s Hironobu Sakaguchi, Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii and Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama.
That’s just for starters, as many people who had or would make a name for themselves within Square were also designated to work on the game, including legendary composers Nobuo Uematsu and Yasunori Mitsuda. This team was able to create an RPG that was considered revolutionary for its time, and to this day is still widely considered one of the best of its genre. It’s hard not to see why. Anywhere you look in Chrono Trigger, there’s something to behold.
Take its storytelling, for example: one could look at the story superficially and state that this is a game about time-travelling teenagers saving the world, and in a sense, they’d be right, but it understates how brilliantly the story is told. For the first few hours, you won’t even realize there is an antagonist, as the characters are pretty much going about their own business. There’s a fair going on, which childhood friends Crono and Lucca are attending. On the way, Crono meets a new girl called Marle, and as the trio test Lucca’s new technological invention, they get thrown four hundred years into the past and have to work their way back home.
There’s a dramatic shift in mood whenever time travel happens, with each era having a defined sound and visual identity that tells part of its story. The Present is expressed in bright tones and a peaceful melody, while the past is somewhat darker and eerier – stepping into it for the first time evokes feelings of mystery, isolation; of being away from home, thrown in the unknown. The Prehistory uses palettes of mostly warm colors, accompanied by simple percussion music; the Antiquity uses sound to contrast between the harmony of the sky cities and the misery on the Earth’s surface; the End of Time looks disjointed and out of place… but no time period hits as hard as in the Future, when the game finally shows its hand and reveals the antagonist.
About two entire quest lines after the fair, both of which are memorable in their own right, the trio stumbles upon the Future. It's terrifying -- the atmosphere is filled with a silent dread, and no matter where you go, it feels desolate and miserable. The ruins of what were once great buildings are filled with bizarre monsters, and whatever’s left of any human settlement has everyone starving. This motivates the heroes to try and find out where – or rather, when – they are and why it looks that way, and sure enough, they find their answer: in an abandoned dome, they learn of the events of the year 1999 A.D. and first hear the name Lavos. The stage is now set for the rest of the adventure.
Lavos is, in itself, a fascinating antagonist. Unlike many other games, where we’re chasing a Bad Guy around as he does Evil Things, the heroes of Chrono Trigger are out to prevent something that has already happened in its entirety, but they don’t know how, thus making the game into more of a quest for knowledge, of understanding a foe before one can even stand up to it. As such, Lavos doesn’t need to make appearances to keep itself relevant: the horrifying suggestion that, if they fail, everyone dies, is always there, hanging over the party's heads.
Chrono Trigger’s plot is masterfully paced. The game presents a series of intertwined storylines taking place in different eras, and whenever the player completes a quest in a certain time period, they get moved to another one where there’s new things to do. This back and forth travelling is not only exciting, but it also paints a fascinating picture of the world’s history in the player’s mind: it's impossible to call any of the game’s historical events pointless or contrived, as everything that happens throughout the eras is not only relevant, it’s a natural consequence of some other event that preceded it.
There’s little in the sense of filler, which explains the game's shorter (and sweeter) runtime compared to its genre peers: even if it's not immediately apparent, each section of the game either inches the player ever forward to its conclusion, or advances a character’s arc. On the latter case, CT further explores the character-driven approach that Final Fantasy VI tried before it: each party member in Chrono Trigger has a defined arc, a journey of their own, that ties seamlessly to the game’s quests, developing and resolving over the course of the game. All of these arcs conclude in the end game with quests entirely dedicated to each character, all of which pack a punch.
Speaking of Final Fantasy, though, Chrono Trigger features an important twist from the typical Final Fantasy battle system: there is no battle screen. As you stumble upon a monster, the party draws their weapons, moves into formation, and begins the fight on the field itself. This means, depending on the enemies and the space available, the positioning of each actor will vary. Naturally, the design of the game took this into account: several battles in the game might look daunting at first, but can be made easy if the player understands the skills in their arsenal and how they work against different groups of foes.
More than that, Chrono Trigger wants you to understand its enemies as well. Many enemies have reactions to your attacks, like counterattacks, stat drops, or even interactions with other foes that the player must take into consideration. When you get to bosses, they feature even more quirks, like multiple parts, defensive stances, temporary vulnerabilities that need to be triggered by specific attacks and even more elaborate counterattacks.
This is not endgame mechanics, mind you: the very first enemy in the game, Gato, has a twist to his patterns: his strongest attack is, by far, his counterattack. After getting hammered in the face a couple of times, you’ll notice that this attack is only performed if Gato is close to a character when he’s hit, thus, if you let him walk away before attacking, the battle is then made much easier. From that moment, the game shows the player how they’ll need to learn these quirks and exploit them: just mashing A will quickly get you killed.
Another beloved element of CT’s combat is the skills performed by multiple party members, which the game calls Dual Techs and Triple Techs. Battles run on ATB gauges, and whenever you have two or more characters ready to act, with specific techs learned, combination techs might become available. Mind you, that’s a lot of extra abilities for you to consider: three for each combination of two characters, plus a bunch of others for each possible party combination. It’s no wonder not many games do this.
It certainly paid off here, however, as it added an extra dimension to party building and battle strategies. They’re also extremely satisfying to use, as the sprite design and animation in Chrono Trigger are works of art: every time a character swings a sword or uses a tech, it feels like they’re truly putting their strength into that attack. When they jump in for a critical, from the animation and the sound, you feel the impact of the blow as well.
But of course, you can’t expect that magic to last forever, and indeed, the game is over before it gets stale. Just like the story has no filler, neither do the dungeons. There are no random battles, and neither are there pointless long treks through a bunch of identical rooms. And if you do happen to get stuck, just talk to Gaspar at The End of Time, and he’ll give you a hint as to where to go next. This design decision is known to have been done for the sake of not having the player wander around aimlessly, like it would often happen in other RPGs at the time.
Chrono Trigger was truly ahead of its time, a masterpiece that’s easy to understand why it is so well remembered. I adore it to bits. There’s so many RPGs from that time that I once held dear but feel underwhelming to play nowadays, but Chrono Trigger stands strong as the one game that I can always look back on, twenty years after first trying it, and never be disappointed.
This review contains spoilers for the first few hours of the game.
Originally released for the SNES in 1995, Chrono Trigger is an RPG developed by Squaresoft, way before its merger with Enix created Square-Enix. The game’s production was kickstarted by a trio dubbed the “Dream Team”, consisting of Final Fantasy’s Hironobu Sakaguchi, Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii and Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama.
That’s just for starters, as many people who had or would make a name for themselves within Square were also designated to work on the game, including legendary composers Nobuo Uematsu and Yasunori Mitsuda. This team was able to create an RPG that was considered revolutionary for its time, and to this day is still widely considered one of the best of its genre. It’s hard not to see why. Anywhere you look in Chrono Trigger, there’s something to behold.
Take its storytelling, for example: one could look at the story superficially and state that this is a game about time-travelling teenagers saving the world, and in a sense, they’d be right, but it understates how brilliantly the story is told. For the first few hours, you won’t even realize there is an antagonist, as the characters are pretty much going about their own business. There’s a fair going on, which childhood friends Crono and Lucca are attending. On the way, Crono meets a new girl called Marle, and as the trio test Lucca’s new technological invention, they get thrown four hundred years into the past and have to work their way back home.
There’s a dramatic shift in mood whenever time travel happens, with each era having a defined sound and visual identity that tells part of its story. The Present is expressed in bright tones and a peaceful melody, while the past is somewhat darker and eerier – stepping into it for the first time evokes feelings of mystery, isolation; of being away from home, thrown in the unknown. The Prehistory uses palettes of mostly warm colors, accompanied by simple percussion music; the Antiquity uses sound to contrast between the harmony of the sky cities and the misery on the Earth’s surface; the End of Time looks disjointed and out of place… but no time period hits as hard as in the Future, when the game finally shows its hand and reveals the antagonist.
About two entire quest lines after the fair, both of which are memorable in their own right, the trio stumbles upon the Future. It's terrifying -- the atmosphere is filled with a silent dread, and no matter where you go, it feels desolate and miserable. The ruins of what were once great buildings are filled with bizarre monsters, and whatever’s left of any human settlement has everyone starving. This motivates the heroes to try and find out where – or rather, when – they are and why it looks that way, and sure enough, they find their answer: in an abandoned dome, they learn of the events of the year 1999 A.D. and first hear the name Lavos. The stage is now set for the rest of the adventure.
Lavos is, in itself, a fascinating antagonist. Unlike many other games, where we’re chasing a Bad Guy around as he does Evil Things, the heroes of Chrono Trigger are out to prevent something that has already happened in its entirety, but they don’t know how, thus making the game into more of a quest for knowledge, of understanding a foe before one can even stand up to it. As such, Lavos doesn’t need to make appearances to keep itself relevant: the horrifying suggestion that, if they fail, everyone dies, is always there, hanging over the party's heads.
Chrono Trigger’s plot is masterfully paced. The game presents a series of intertwined storylines taking place in different eras, and whenever the player completes a quest in a certain time period, they get moved to another one where there’s new things to do. This back and forth travelling is not only exciting, but it also paints a fascinating picture of the world’s history in the player’s mind: it's impossible to call any of the game’s historical events pointless or contrived, as everything that happens throughout the eras is not only relevant, it’s a natural consequence of some other event that preceded it.
There’s little in the sense of filler, which explains the game's shorter (and sweeter) runtime compared to its genre peers: even if it's not immediately apparent, each section of the game either inches the player ever forward to its conclusion, or advances a character’s arc. On the latter case, CT further explores the character-driven approach that Final Fantasy VI tried before it: each party member in Chrono Trigger has a defined arc, a journey of their own, that ties seamlessly to the game’s quests, developing and resolving over the course of the game. All of these arcs conclude in the end game with quests entirely dedicated to each character, all of which pack a punch.
Speaking of Final Fantasy, though, Chrono Trigger features an important twist from the typical Final Fantasy battle system: there is no battle screen. As you stumble upon a monster, the party draws their weapons, moves into formation, and begins the fight on the field itself. This means, depending on the enemies and the space available, the positioning of each actor will vary. Naturally, the design of the game took this into account: several battles in the game might look daunting at first, but can be made easy if the player understands the skills in their arsenal and how they work against different groups of foes.
More than that, Chrono Trigger wants you to understand its enemies as well. Many enemies have reactions to your attacks, like counterattacks, stat drops, or even interactions with other foes that the player must take into consideration. When you get to bosses, they feature even more quirks, like multiple parts, defensive stances, temporary vulnerabilities that need to be triggered by specific attacks and even more elaborate counterattacks.
This is not endgame mechanics, mind you: the very first enemy in the game, Gato, has a twist to his patterns: his strongest attack is, by far, his counterattack. After getting hammered in the face a couple of times, you’ll notice that this attack is only performed if Gato is close to a character when he’s hit, thus, if you let him walk away before attacking, the battle is then made much easier. From that moment, the game shows the player how they’ll need to learn these quirks and exploit them: just mashing A will quickly get you killed.
Another beloved element of CT’s combat is the skills performed by multiple party members, which the game calls Dual Techs and Triple Techs. Battles run on ATB gauges, and whenever you have two or more characters ready to act, with specific techs learned, combination techs might become available. Mind you, that’s a lot of extra abilities for you to consider: three for each combination of two characters, plus a bunch of others for each possible party combination. It’s no wonder not many games do this.
It certainly paid off here, however, as it added an extra dimension to party building and battle strategies. They’re also extremely satisfying to use, as the sprite design and animation in Chrono Trigger are works of art: every time a character swings a sword or uses a tech, it feels like they’re truly putting their strength into that attack. When they jump in for a critical, from the animation and the sound, you feel the impact of the blow as well.
But of course, you can’t expect that magic to last forever, and indeed, the game is over before it gets stale. Just like the story has no filler, neither do the dungeons. There are no random battles, and neither are there pointless long treks through a bunch of identical rooms. And if you do happen to get stuck, just talk to Gaspar at The End of Time, and he’ll give you a hint as to where to go next. This design decision is known to have been done for the sake of not having the player wander around aimlessly, like it would often happen in other RPGs at the time.
Chrono Trigger was truly ahead of its time, a masterpiece that’s easy to understand why it is so well remembered. I adore it to bits. There’s so many RPGs from that time that I once held dear but feel underwhelming to play nowadays, but Chrono Trigger stands strong as the one game that I can always look back on, twenty years after first trying it, and never be disappointed.
It’s… more of the base game, and honestly sold at a low enough price that there’s no reason not to pick it up if you’re picking up the base game as well.
2009
RTS is a genre that's notoriously difficult to approach for someone who has never played it, as managing an army, buildings, research and resource gathering simultaneously is a task that proves overwhelming even for experienced gamers. Swords and Soldiers shoots for the sidescrolling RTS, a variation of the concept that does a lot to undo the inherent complexity. However, I feel it might have gone a bit too far towards the other end of the spectrum.
In the game, two players have bases on opposite sides of the map, and any non-worker units deployed walk in the opponent's direction until they either die or destroy the base there. There's no degree of micromanagement involved, nor are there hotkeys or anything of the sort, and the difficulty is kept pretty low. It's pretty simple, and at least for me, stages were over in very few minutes. It took some of the more challenging achievements to create some more involved gameplay.
The story is also not bad, but also not anything to write home about. There are three playable factions in the game, Vikings, Aztecs and Chinese, and they're not fighting for any reason you would expect. It's all very cartoonish, which you would expect given the cheerful presentation.
It's good for some casual fun, though.
In the game, two players have bases on opposite sides of the map, and any non-worker units deployed walk in the opponent's direction until they either die or destroy the base there. There's no degree of micromanagement involved, nor are there hotkeys or anything of the sort, and the difficulty is kept pretty low. It's pretty simple, and at least for me, stages were over in very few minutes. It took some of the more challenging achievements to create some more involved gameplay.
The story is also not bad, but also not anything to write home about. There are three playable factions in the game, Vikings, Aztecs and Chinese, and they're not fighting for any reason you would expect. It's all very cartoonish, which you would expect given the cheerful presentation.
It's good for some casual fun, though.
I wasn't long into Fantasy Life when I caved in and bought the expansion. The game was just so, so awesome that there was no way I wouldn't want to continue after being done with the base game. And I was right: After wrapping the story up, after getting all jobs leveled up to max, I wanted more. I went for it. I would soon come to regret it.
The expansion picks up right at the ending of the base game and has you and your crew stumbling upon Origin Island, an island from which Reveria was created eons ago. The writing is as good as always, bringing about tears and laughter, but it’s also about the length of one chapter of the main game, too rushed to have full effectiveness. It brings about moments of closure for some of the main game's supporting cast, though, and I wish it had spent more of its time on that instead of... everything else it did.
In the base game, which is one of my all-time favorites, the player's progression is carefully thought out, with there being tiers of enemies, of materials and of gear with which each Life is concerned. It's not possible to craft the best armor from the get go, but as you take on more dangerous adventures, you're rewarded with better components on-hand, with which you can return to town to create better gear, rinse and repeat. The way it perfectly executes this gameplay loop is one of the reasons Fantasy Life is so stellar.
Compare that to the DLC, where there was no thought given to progression whatsoever. Everything is open from the get go, every monster has more or less the same power level. You get to see almost every area in a few minutes and max out all Lives not soon after. The one hard -- not fun -- part is beating the four new bosses, which feel balanced around co-op with their ridiculous attack patterns and damage output.
It's at this point, with everything explored, all classes maxed and essentially the magic of the game having worn off, that the game invites you to take on the Trials of Time, Darkness and Light at the Ancient Tower, which pit you against increasingly dangerous monsters as you strive to reach the top.
If I had to make a list for "the things I wanted the least in a Fantasy Life expansion", combat gauntlets would rank pretty high up, so the presence of these Trials after an underwhelming adventure felt like a giant middle finger. Again, it all seems aimed at co-op players: a quick re-spec at the Tome of Shadows will show that, even with your attacking stats at the new cap, mere common monsters at the Trials will take a while for a solo player to take down.
"Obviously, it must be all about the gear?", was what I thought, before I sat to browse the available recipes and was met with the cherry on top for this piece of downloadable torment: Never mind that the best gear is restricted to male characters, which is another middle finger, but to get the materials you need for new gear to take on the Trials of the Ancient Tower... you have to farm the hardest Trial over and over for materials.
I'm still baffled that someone thought this design was okay. For all my complaining, I'm still underselling how hard these trials are: in the final one, the Trial of Light, most enemies will two-shot you. I took the advice of a GameFAQs poster that was, essentially, “go in as a Hunter, kite everything, and bring stacks of Life Cures”, which got me to the top floor after hours of tedious kiting. There I fought a dragon for which not even kiting was enough, and I would be dead within seconds of resurrecting, all the time. I took to abusing the Life Cure’s i-frames to win.
The sickest part? After all that, I still didn't have enough materials to craft jack.
This was the end of my experience with Origin Island. For all the smiles the original game gave me, for all the feelings of joy, discovery and triumph, the expansion left me only with a bitter taste in my mouth. Those brief extra moments with beloved characters may have been meaningful, but the way the expansion perverts everything good about the base game makes it impossible to recommend to anyone.
The expansion picks up right at the ending of the base game and has you and your crew stumbling upon Origin Island, an island from which Reveria was created eons ago. The writing is as good as always, bringing about tears and laughter, but it’s also about the length of one chapter of the main game, too rushed to have full effectiveness. It brings about moments of closure for some of the main game's supporting cast, though, and I wish it had spent more of its time on that instead of... everything else it did.
In the base game, which is one of my all-time favorites, the player's progression is carefully thought out, with there being tiers of enemies, of materials and of gear with which each Life is concerned. It's not possible to craft the best armor from the get go, but as you take on more dangerous adventures, you're rewarded with better components on-hand, with which you can return to town to create better gear, rinse and repeat. The way it perfectly executes this gameplay loop is one of the reasons Fantasy Life is so stellar.
Compare that to the DLC, where there was no thought given to progression whatsoever. Everything is open from the get go, every monster has more or less the same power level. You get to see almost every area in a few minutes and max out all Lives not soon after. The one hard -- not fun -- part is beating the four new bosses, which feel balanced around co-op with their ridiculous attack patterns and damage output.
It's at this point, with everything explored, all classes maxed and essentially the magic of the game having worn off, that the game invites you to take on the Trials of Time, Darkness and Light at the Ancient Tower, which pit you against increasingly dangerous monsters as you strive to reach the top.
If I had to make a list for "the things I wanted the least in a Fantasy Life expansion", combat gauntlets would rank pretty high up, so the presence of these Trials after an underwhelming adventure felt like a giant middle finger. Again, it all seems aimed at co-op players: a quick re-spec at the Tome of Shadows will show that, even with your attacking stats at the new cap, mere common monsters at the Trials will take a while for a solo player to take down.
"Obviously, it must be all about the gear?", was what I thought, before I sat to browse the available recipes and was met with the cherry on top for this piece of downloadable torment: Never mind that the best gear is restricted to male characters, which is another middle finger, but to get the materials you need for new gear to take on the Trials of the Ancient Tower... you have to farm the hardest Trial over and over for materials.
I'm still baffled that someone thought this design was okay. For all my complaining, I'm still underselling how hard these trials are: in the final one, the Trial of Light, most enemies will two-shot you. I took the advice of a GameFAQs poster that was, essentially, “go in as a Hunter, kite everything, and bring stacks of Life Cures”, which got me to the top floor after hours of tedious kiting. There I fought a dragon for which not even kiting was enough, and I would be dead within seconds of resurrecting, all the time. I took to abusing the Life Cure’s i-frames to win.
The sickest part? After all that, I still didn't have enough materials to craft jack.
This was the end of my experience with Origin Island. For all the smiles the original game gave me, for all the feelings of joy, discovery and triumph, the expansion left me only with a bitter taste in my mouth. Those brief extra moments with beloved characters may have been meaningful, but the way the expansion perverts everything good about the base game makes it impossible to recommend to anyone.
2013
If you tell people that there's a game where you play as Satan, they'll probably think of torturing innocent souls, razing cities, fighting against god... You know, wreaking havoc on an untold scale. That could work, but the folks behind Unholy Heights decided that Satan would do something even more evil, something so vile, only the worst of the worst would do: he'd become a landlord.
"The Devil's spent his savings on a place in the projects!" is the line that opens the game. Satan now owns an apartment building, and has to bring monsters in as tenants to not only raise some money, but also to protect the place from foolish adventurers looking to slay him. Yep, he won't even set up proper security, the cheapskate.
The entire game takes place in the apartment complex, of which you have a side view. Monsters will come to you seeking to rent a unit, and you can choose to accommodate them or turn them away. While they're living in the complex, you periodically collect rent from them, money with which you can either upgrade the individual apartments or expand the complex to accommodate more tenants.
All the while, adventurers who have it out for The Devil will assault the building. Their parties will climb floor by floor, attempting to reach The Devil's room, and you have to call on the tenants to prevent that from happening, knocking on their doors to ask them to fight. In these moments, the game plays something like an RTS plus tower defense: you micromanage tenants in and out of battle as their health goes low or as the situation calls for it: for instance, some foes are weak to magic or physical attacks, and so are your monsters, so the front lines have to account for that. More than that, since each monster has specific traits and attack patterns, the positioning of each tenant in the complex is in itself part of your battle strategy.
As the game progresses, you'll face more difficult enemies and become able to unlock higher tier monsters, as well as expand the complex to accommodate more tenants. It's here that I feel the game falters a bit: the quest-based progression feels too linear and rigid, often grinding the game to a halt as you shuffle to raise certain sums, and the mechanics surrounding each monster type -- their needs and intrinsic traits -- could have been explained better.
It's a lot easier to put up with that than it sounds, though, as a cute cartoon-ish presentation makes the intense management gameplay feel a lot softer and more carefree: as the complex grows and improves with time, and so will your monsters, who develop their careers, find love, and even have children. It's hard not to get attached to them, and feel saddened if they die or move away.
Unholy Heights is an underrated gem, and it was a blast to revisit it on console -- a transition done impressively seamlessly -- almost a decade after playing the original release on Steam. With an unique concept and an incredibly low asking price for its quality, it's worth at least giving it a shot.
"The Devil's spent his savings on a place in the projects!" is the line that opens the game. Satan now owns an apartment building, and has to bring monsters in as tenants to not only raise some money, but also to protect the place from foolish adventurers looking to slay him. Yep, he won't even set up proper security, the cheapskate.
The entire game takes place in the apartment complex, of which you have a side view. Monsters will come to you seeking to rent a unit, and you can choose to accommodate them or turn them away. While they're living in the complex, you periodically collect rent from them, money with which you can either upgrade the individual apartments or expand the complex to accommodate more tenants.
All the while, adventurers who have it out for The Devil will assault the building. Their parties will climb floor by floor, attempting to reach The Devil's room, and you have to call on the tenants to prevent that from happening, knocking on their doors to ask them to fight. In these moments, the game plays something like an RTS plus tower defense: you micromanage tenants in and out of battle as their health goes low or as the situation calls for it: for instance, some foes are weak to magic or physical attacks, and so are your monsters, so the front lines have to account for that. More than that, since each monster has specific traits and attack patterns, the positioning of each tenant in the complex is in itself part of your battle strategy.
As the game progresses, you'll face more difficult enemies and become able to unlock higher tier monsters, as well as expand the complex to accommodate more tenants. It's here that I feel the game falters a bit: the quest-based progression feels too linear and rigid, often grinding the game to a halt as you shuffle to raise certain sums, and the mechanics surrounding each monster type -- their needs and intrinsic traits -- could have been explained better.
It's a lot easier to put up with that than it sounds, though, as a cute cartoon-ish presentation makes the intense management gameplay feel a lot softer and more carefree: as the complex grows and improves with time, and so will your monsters, who develop their careers, find love, and even have children. It's hard not to get attached to them, and feel saddened if they die or move away.
Unholy Heights is an underrated gem, and it was a blast to revisit it on console -- a transition done impressively seamlessly -- almost a decade after playing the original release on Steam. With an unique concept and an incredibly low asking price for its quality, it's worth at least giving it a shot.
2018
The year is 1793. Mom and son duo Sarah and Louis De Richet, members of a secret society, are hot on the trail of the Al Azif, a mysterious grimoire said to hold secrets of the occult. They discover that a prospective buyer will attend a conference held by the mysterious aristocrat Lord William Mortimer on his private island, and Sarah sets off alone to find them. Weeks later, Louis is summoned to the island to help search for his mother, who has disappeared. There, he discovers there's more to this case than he first thought.
The Council is a narrative-driven experience that promises a fresh take on the genre by throwing RPG mechanics and character building into the mix. Unlike many of its genre peers, The Council has no combat mechanics of any sort, nor does it have QTEs. Instead, Louis can have up to fifteen different skills which he can use during conversations to persuade others, as well as during investigations to uncover clues.
Backing this system are the effort points, a limited resource which is expended during skill checks according to the difficulty of the check and the current level of the skill, thus making the player consider when to better employ their unlocked talents. Skills can be unlocked and leveled up at the players' discretion with exp. points accrued at the end of each of the game's fifteen main quests.
A lot of people seem to compare The Council to TellTale's games, but I find that comparison inappropriate for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that The Council is a lot more elegant about how it handles player choice. Instead of bombarding the player with cynical "x will remember that" prompts in a desperate attempt to make them care about what they're doing, The Council keeps its cards close to its chest: does this moment matter in the long run? Maybe it does, maybe it does not. You'll have to live with the anticipation, now, won’t you?
Plus, in The Council, there is no failure state. The game never reaches a Game Over screen and keeps going regardless of how badly you mess up. Apart from just making wrong choices in general, the game features complex puzzles in which the player may come to the wrong answer, as well as confrontations, which are heated dialogues where Louis must talk a person into or away from doing something, and can only pick so many wrong dialogue options before they become angry or lose interest. Interestingly, each character has specific weaknesses and immunities to your skills, and it pays off to discover them beforehand.
All the while, the game is quietly noting down the paths you take. Every so often, the choice legitimately doesn’t matter: it will be acknowledged in dialogue, but mostly forgotten. Sometimes, information or items obtained will open up new possibilities in the future, like new dialogue paths that would otherwise be grayed out, but other times, events will leave lasting marks: Louis will be left scarred or maimed, or a character will die and be absent for the rest of the game. And among all of these, there are moments that decide the game’s ending, a handful of situations that, even if you don’t notice at first, will shape the story’s conclusion, both for Louis and the supporting cast. There are a surprising number of ways in which the final scenes may resolve, depending on how resourceful Louis proves to be during his quest and who he chooses to side with.
The game takes place in a singular location, that being Lord Mortimer's island-mansion, and allows the player to more or less free roam around it searching for their next objectives instead of taking them from scene to scene, which enhances the sense of freedom even though, apart from a couple of forks in the path, the story plays out in a linear fashion. In fact, I almost wish it was more linear: sometimes, the game will allow you to pick one of two scenes to experience – it does so four times in the first episode alone – but it’s but a contrived choice, and if one were able to experience both scenes linearly, their understanding of the narrative and characters would have been enhanced.
Mechanics getting in the way of storytelling like that are the main issue I see in The Council. The biggest offender is the exp yield: exp is earned from finding items in the environment and completing predetermined objectives in each scenario. The former will have you combing each room obsessively trying to hoard as many items as possible, but it's when exp gain becomes the driving factor behind your choices that enjoying the narrative becomes harder. You can miss out on a lot of exp by not making the correct choices and/or not having a necessary skill unlocked at the right time, the latter of which, granted, is more common during the beginning hours than anywhere else.
The character builds and roleplay, as enticing as they are, also feel janky at times. During the opening moments, there's a choice of character class for Louis that determines his starting skills. Never mind that there are clearly superior choices of character build due to the uneven opportunities to use each skill, but it's always better to make Louis a jack-of-all-trades instead of specializing in a particular archetype: there are few cases where a skill check can't be bypassed, and in most of those, if you plan carefully, having a Lv1 skill is enough to get the full benefits.
Still, as flawed as the game may be, it doesn’t take away its successes: it presents a fascinating framework for a narrative-driven RPG, one that can and should be studied and iterated upon. Mechanics like character weaknesses and vulnerabilities, opportunities, confrontations and even parts of its skill systems are exciting ways to solve problems without combat, and the game still boasts an entertaining narrative that, while a bit convoluted by the end and not entirely spotless, presents an unusual setting and compensates for its less than extraordinary budget with smart art and scene direction.
All in all, The Council is a novel, fascinating game that has been on my mind since I finished it. It’s easy to see why it’s such a controversial experience, but for fans of narrative-driven experiences, it’s a definite recommendation.
The Council is a narrative-driven experience that promises a fresh take on the genre by throwing RPG mechanics and character building into the mix. Unlike many of its genre peers, The Council has no combat mechanics of any sort, nor does it have QTEs. Instead, Louis can have up to fifteen different skills which he can use during conversations to persuade others, as well as during investigations to uncover clues.
Backing this system are the effort points, a limited resource which is expended during skill checks according to the difficulty of the check and the current level of the skill, thus making the player consider when to better employ their unlocked talents. Skills can be unlocked and leveled up at the players' discretion with exp. points accrued at the end of each of the game's fifteen main quests.
A lot of people seem to compare The Council to TellTale's games, but I find that comparison inappropriate for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that The Council is a lot more elegant about how it handles player choice. Instead of bombarding the player with cynical "x will remember that" prompts in a desperate attempt to make them care about what they're doing, The Council keeps its cards close to its chest: does this moment matter in the long run? Maybe it does, maybe it does not. You'll have to live with the anticipation, now, won’t you?
Plus, in The Council, there is no failure state. The game never reaches a Game Over screen and keeps going regardless of how badly you mess up. Apart from just making wrong choices in general, the game features complex puzzles in which the player may come to the wrong answer, as well as confrontations, which are heated dialogues where Louis must talk a person into or away from doing something, and can only pick so many wrong dialogue options before they become angry or lose interest. Interestingly, each character has specific weaknesses and immunities to your skills, and it pays off to discover them beforehand.
All the while, the game is quietly noting down the paths you take. Every so often, the choice legitimately doesn’t matter: it will be acknowledged in dialogue, but mostly forgotten. Sometimes, information or items obtained will open up new possibilities in the future, like new dialogue paths that would otherwise be grayed out, but other times, events will leave lasting marks: Louis will be left scarred or maimed, or a character will die and be absent for the rest of the game. And among all of these, there are moments that decide the game’s ending, a handful of situations that, even if you don’t notice at first, will shape the story’s conclusion, both for Louis and the supporting cast. There are a surprising number of ways in which the final scenes may resolve, depending on how resourceful Louis proves to be during his quest and who he chooses to side with.
The game takes place in a singular location, that being Lord Mortimer's island-mansion, and allows the player to more or less free roam around it searching for their next objectives instead of taking them from scene to scene, which enhances the sense of freedom even though, apart from a couple of forks in the path, the story plays out in a linear fashion. In fact, I almost wish it was more linear: sometimes, the game will allow you to pick one of two scenes to experience – it does so four times in the first episode alone – but it’s but a contrived choice, and if one were able to experience both scenes linearly, their understanding of the narrative and characters would have been enhanced.
Mechanics getting in the way of storytelling like that are the main issue I see in The Council. The biggest offender is the exp yield: exp is earned from finding items in the environment and completing predetermined objectives in each scenario. The former will have you combing each room obsessively trying to hoard as many items as possible, but it's when exp gain becomes the driving factor behind your choices that enjoying the narrative becomes harder. You can miss out on a lot of exp by not making the correct choices and/or not having a necessary skill unlocked at the right time, the latter of which, granted, is more common during the beginning hours than anywhere else.
The character builds and roleplay, as enticing as they are, also feel janky at times. During the opening moments, there's a choice of character class for Louis that determines his starting skills. Never mind that there are clearly superior choices of character build due to the uneven opportunities to use each skill, but it's always better to make Louis a jack-of-all-trades instead of specializing in a particular archetype: there are few cases where a skill check can't be bypassed, and in most of those, if you plan carefully, having a Lv1 skill is enough to get the full benefits.
Still, as flawed as the game may be, it doesn’t take away its successes: it presents a fascinating framework for a narrative-driven RPG, one that can and should be studied and iterated upon. Mechanics like character weaknesses and vulnerabilities, opportunities, confrontations and even parts of its skill systems are exciting ways to solve problems without combat, and the game still boasts an entertaining narrative that, while a bit convoluted by the end and not entirely spotless, presents an unusual setting and compensates for its less than extraordinary budget with smart art and scene direction.
All in all, The Council is a novel, fascinating game that has been on my mind since I finished it. It’s easy to see why it’s such a controversial experience, but for fans of narrative-driven experiences, it’s a definite recommendation.
2013
Like a fistful of dirt to the face.
SteamWorld Dig is a 3DS downloadable title starring robot prospector Rusty, who inherited his missing uncle's mine. Shortly after arriving, Rusty finds his uncle’s "body" inside the caves, and with nothing else to do, decides to explore the mine in hopes of finding... something?
SteamWorld Dig has some of the laziest, cheapest storytelling on the 3DS. As the game begins, you just dig yourself into an ever deeper hole because maybe your uncle had a reason for you to do so, I guess, probably, and the entire game just keeps being handwavy like that, all the way to the (incredibly vague and disappointing) ending. Do the thing and maybe you'll find a reason. And it really hurts, because the experience desperately needed some motivation to go on.
Gameplay revolves around digging deeper and deeper in the mine, with frequent returns to town to sell off minerals and buy upgrades. The mine is randomly generated for the save file, but you'll find entrances to caves that offer a fixed, platforming stage, at the end of which you'll mostly acquire a new ability, Metroidvania style, which you can use on the next cave.
These cave sections are brief, yet they represent the only real content in the game, the one part that was carefully crafted. The mining part, which makes up the bulk of the experience, is clearly just there to waste time, to a point where the game has to contrive a reason -- low inventory space that needs to be upgraded -- for you to waste time going back to town.
And it hurts to see that there could have been a real game here: controlling Rusty feels great, especially when he’s fully upgraded at the end game and can rapidly move through maps. He's very well animated to boot. On a more fleshed out game, it could have shined, but on this one, it’s all wasted. Were it not for the fact that I could play the 3DS version on the go, I wouldn't even have finished the game, which is pretty damning considering it’s about five hours long. Awful.
SteamWorld Dig is a 3DS downloadable title starring robot prospector Rusty, who inherited his missing uncle's mine. Shortly after arriving, Rusty finds his uncle’s "body" inside the caves, and with nothing else to do, decides to explore the mine in hopes of finding... something?
SteamWorld Dig has some of the laziest, cheapest storytelling on the 3DS. As the game begins, you just dig yourself into an ever deeper hole because maybe your uncle had a reason for you to do so, I guess, probably, and the entire game just keeps being handwavy like that, all the way to the (incredibly vague and disappointing) ending. Do the thing and maybe you'll find a reason. And it really hurts, because the experience desperately needed some motivation to go on.
Gameplay revolves around digging deeper and deeper in the mine, with frequent returns to town to sell off minerals and buy upgrades. The mine is randomly generated for the save file, but you'll find entrances to caves that offer a fixed, platforming stage, at the end of which you'll mostly acquire a new ability, Metroidvania style, which you can use on the next cave.
These cave sections are brief, yet they represent the only real content in the game, the one part that was carefully crafted. The mining part, which makes up the bulk of the experience, is clearly just there to waste time, to a point where the game has to contrive a reason -- low inventory space that needs to be upgraded -- for you to waste time going back to town.
And it hurts to see that there could have been a real game here: controlling Rusty feels great, especially when he’s fully upgraded at the end game and can rapidly move through maps. He's very well animated to boot. On a more fleshed out game, it could have shined, but on this one, it’s all wasted. Were it not for the fact that I could play the 3DS version on the go, I wouldn't even have finished the game, which is pretty damning considering it’s about five hours long. Awful.
2012
When I was younger and more prone to spending time online playing free MMOs, the ones that fascinated me the most were the ones that allowed me to do something other than fighting monsters. It's not that I didn't like the fighting, nor that I didn’t know any games without combat, it’s just that being in a fantasy world as something other than a warrior felt so special. It wasn't until 2013's Fantasy Life, however, that someone made a game to cater specifically to that taste.
Fantasy Life is an action RPG, and its premise is simple: You're a citizen of Castele, a kingdom in the magical land of Reveria, and time has come for you to choose your Life -- that is, your job. There are twelve Lifes to choose from, four of which are fighters (Paladin, Mercenary, Hunter and Magician) and eight of which are not (Miner, Angler, Woodcutter, Carpenter, Blacksmith, Alchemist, Cook and Tailor).
While Lives might sound like a fixed character class, it is but a transitory state: once you've gotten your license for your first Life -- essentially a tutorial -- and progressed a bit through the game, you're free to go back and get a license for another Life and swap between them whenever. And that's the beauty of the world of Fantasy Life: it's filled with quests and opportunities for every Life, and your approach to locations changes depending on which class you are currently.
More than that, while you can, theoretically, pick a Life and play through the entire game on it, the game actively discourages that sort of approach, instead making it so the work of a class is crucial for the success of another. A Blacksmith needs raw ore and wooden beams, the latter of which a Carpenter has to create from logs, but they, in turn, need fabric to fashion some of their furniture, which a Tailor can provide. Fighter classes can provide rare materials they collect from monsters, and benefit from improved gear that crafters can create.
Each Life has a rank, starting from Novice and moving all the way up to Legend. To increase one's rank, class-specific quests must be completed: Craft said item, kill said monsters, recover the wood from a special tree, find a specific mineral, and so on. These lists of quests are refreshed every time you move up a rank, and have you adventuring all over Reveria to get them done.
Reveria is an excellently realized game world. Some players call Fantasy Life "a single player MMO", which in some ways, it is, but crucially, it avoids the common trap amongst games with that tagline where the world is made large, sparse, and boring. Reveria is instead densely packed, filled with interesting places to visit, loot to collect and boons to find. The game rewards exploring on your own, as there's many locations the story alone will not show you through but that will benefit specific Lives.
Speaking of which, I love the story in Fantasy Life. It starts off a bit clichéd, as an unassuming adventurer fresh from obtaining their first Life license -- that's you -- gets dragged into an adventure which will have them meeting god and preventing the destruction of the world. However, it's that stellar kind of E-rated writing that makes you feel like the main character in a saturday morning cartoon, going on a grand adventure where you make friends and help people in need.
The game features a wide cast of lovable characters, each of which has a distinct personality and their own twists. This then feeds into the stakes of the narrative: it's easy, in games with grimdark and moody settings, to lose sight of your goals, of what your character is meant to be fighting for. Fantasy Life makes sure to show you how much good there is in Reveria before it shows the threat looming above it: it looks childish and is often very playful, but it's also really good at creating drama and tension when needed.
The quality of the main story was a nice surprise: I wasn't expecting that when I first started playing, but once it got going, it was one of the rare instances where I temporarily put aside all the side content in a game until I finished the main story, just to see how it would end. Another surprise was the excellent soundtrack, which was composed by Nobuo Uematsu, and it shows. The background music is phenomenal, and there are some vocal songs that play on special occasions that are a treat.
Fantasy Life is a truly remarkable experience: it stands as my favorite 3DS game, and it's criminal that, nearly ten years later, the closest thing we got for a sequel was a lousy mobile game. Should you choose to visit Reveria, be it brandishing a sword versus a giant dragon, swinging your hammer against the anvil, reeling in a fish or making a delicious omelet, your time is sure to be exciting.
Fantasy Life is an action RPG, and its premise is simple: You're a citizen of Castele, a kingdom in the magical land of Reveria, and time has come for you to choose your Life -- that is, your job. There are twelve Lifes to choose from, four of which are fighters (Paladin, Mercenary, Hunter and Magician) and eight of which are not (Miner, Angler, Woodcutter, Carpenter, Blacksmith, Alchemist, Cook and Tailor).
While Lives might sound like a fixed character class, it is but a transitory state: once you've gotten your license for your first Life -- essentially a tutorial -- and progressed a bit through the game, you're free to go back and get a license for another Life and swap between them whenever. And that's the beauty of the world of Fantasy Life: it's filled with quests and opportunities for every Life, and your approach to locations changes depending on which class you are currently.
More than that, while you can, theoretically, pick a Life and play through the entire game on it, the game actively discourages that sort of approach, instead making it so the work of a class is crucial for the success of another. A Blacksmith needs raw ore and wooden beams, the latter of which a Carpenter has to create from logs, but they, in turn, need fabric to fashion some of their furniture, which a Tailor can provide. Fighter classes can provide rare materials they collect from monsters, and benefit from improved gear that crafters can create.
Each Life has a rank, starting from Novice and moving all the way up to Legend. To increase one's rank, class-specific quests must be completed: Craft said item, kill said monsters, recover the wood from a special tree, find a specific mineral, and so on. These lists of quests are refreshed every time you move up a rank, and have you adventuring all over Reveria to get them done.
Reveria is an excellently realized game world. Some players call Fantasy Life "a single player MMO", which in some ways, it is, but crucially, it avoids the common trap amongst games with that tagline where the world is made large, sparse, and boring. Reveria is instead densely packed, filled with interesting places to visit, loot to collect and boons to find. The game rewards exploring on your own, as there's many locations the story alone will not show you through but that will benefit specific Lives.
Speaking of which, I love the story in Fantasy Life. It starts off a bit clichéd, as an unassuming adventurer fresh from obtaining their first Life license -- that's you -- gets dragged into an adventure which will have them meeting god and preventing the destruction of the world. However, it's that stellar kind of E-rated writing that makes you feel like the main character in a saturday morning cartoon, going on a grand adventure where you make friends and help people in need.
The game features a wide cast of lovable characters, each of which has a distinct personality and their own twists. This then feeds into the stakes of the narrative: it's easy, in games with grimdark and moody settings, to lose sight of your goals, of what your character is meant to be fighting for. Fantasy Life makes sure to show you how much good there is in Reveria before it shows the threat looming above it: it looks childish and is often very playful, but it's also really good at creating drama and tension when needed.
The quality of the main story was a nice surprise: I wasn't expecting that when I first started playing, but once it got going, it was one of the rare instances where I temporarily put aside all the side content in a game until I finished the main story, just to see how it would end. Another surprise was the excellent soundtrack, which was composed by Nobuo Uematsu, and it shows. The background music is phenomenal, and there are some vocal songs that play on special occasions that are a treat.
Fantasy Life is a truly remarkable experience: it stands as my favorite 3DS game, and it's criminal that, nearly ten years later, the closest thing we got for a sequel was a lousy mobile game. Should you choose to visit Reveria, be it brandishing a sword versus a giant dragon, swinging your hammer against the anvil, reeling in a fish or making a delicious omelet, your time is sure to be exciting.
2011
Pushmo is a block pushing puzzle that's cute and novel, but it felt too repetitive never quite clicked with me.
RPG and Tower Defense are genres that, at first glance, don't seem like they would mix. One is about adventuring all over the world, while the other focuses on protecting a given place in isolated, individual stages. But then, one look at Defender's Quest, and it makes you wonder why no one had this idea before.
Its story takes place in The Pit, a valley that's practically isolated from the rest of the world by the nigh unsurpassable rock formations that surround it. This isolation made the place a prime candidate for a quarantine zone when a plague hit, one that turns the people it kills into mindless monsters and led the people to take all the afflicted, whether dead or dying, and toss them into the Pit, abandoning them to their fate.
Such is the fate of Azra, the Royal Librarian of the Ash Kingdom. Thrown into the Pit and left to die, during her last moments, she hears a mysterious voice, that of a dark being beckoning her to its side. She finds out that, unlike most of the other afflicted, she can resist its call and fight back, and after preventing her life from being taken, she sets out on an adventure across the Pit, where she'll meet other survivors like her and seek the truth behind the plague.
While the "written by an actual English major" tagline from the game's marketing might strike one as a bit obnoxious, Defender's Quest absolutely does deliver on the promise of a compelling story. Azra's adventure has the comfy vibes of a cartoon, featuring a varied cast and mixing drama, mystery and comedy in an enthralling package. The main narrative alone is worth the price of admission.
The way the game meshes tower defense and RPG mechanics completes the experience. Instead of towers, Azra can place units on the field to protect herself from the enemy hordes, units you not only recruit, but also develop while outside of stages. Each unit has a class and a skill tree that can enhance some aspects of that unit's functionality, in essence, allowing you to specialize each character for certain roles when deployed.
During stages, enemies come in waves towards Azra's position, in standard tower defense fashion. There are no gotchas: from the start, you're given information about every wave that will come at you and the paths they'll take. There's also no interest mechanic, so you're free to focus solely on your strategy. You can pick between using your resources to deploy units or upgrade them, or you can cast one of Azra's powerful, but short duration, spells.
Each stage challenges you to beat it in different difficulty levels while letting no enemies get to Azra, which has you going back and forth in the world map while developing your team. My favorite part, however, was doing Hero Mode, which purposefully limits your unit count and forces you to not only develop your team more carefully, but also go back and forth during certain battles. It's a new dimension to the game's strategizing that I never forgot about, and it’s not hard to lose track of time doing it, as not only is the gameplay exciting on its own, the game also also features an incredibly good soundtrack.
Defender's Quest is just such a blast -- I originally played it for dozens of hours, and simply opening it for the sake of writing this review accidentally had me playing for a couple more. It's an underrated gem of an indie game, and a tower defense game that is able to please even people who don't typically enjoy the genre.
One last thing: older reviews might comment on the game's poor performance. Back when the game was first released, it used a framework called Adobe AIR, which was notably janky: it would take a lot of RAM and slow down the entire computer. Since then, Defender's Quest received a DX version which is the same game remade in a proper game engine, and runs much more smoothly. If you already had the game, the upgrade was free, so if you had performance problems before, it's worth giving the game another shot.
I cannot wait for the sequel!
Its story takes place in The Pit, a valley that's practically isolated from the rest of the world by the nigh unsurpassable rock formations that surround it. This isolation made the place a prime candidate for a quarantine zone when a plague hit, one that turns the people it kills into mindless monsters and led the people to take all the afflicted, whether dead or dying, and toss them into the Pit, abandoning them to their fate.
Such is the fate of Azra, the Royal Librarian of the Ash Kingdom. Thrown into the Pit and left to die, during her last moments, she hears a mysterious voice, that of a dark being beckoning her to its side. She finds out that, unlike most of the other afflicted, she can resist its call and fight back, and after preventing her life from being taken, she sets out on an adventure across the Pit, where she'll meet other survivors like her and seek the truth behind the plague.
While the "written by an actual English major" tagline from the game's marketing might strike one as a bit obnoxious, Defender's Quest absolutely does deliver on the promise of a compelling story. Azra's adventure has the comfy vibes of a cartoon, featuring a varied cast and mixing drama, mystery and comedy in an enthralling package. The main narrative alone is worth the price of admission.
The way the game meshes tower defense and RPG mechanics completes the experience. Instead of towers, Azra can place units on the field to protect herself from the enemy hordes, units you not only recruit, but also develop while outside of stages. Each unit has a class and a skill tree that can enhance some aspects of that unit's functionality, in essence, allowing you to specialize each character for certain roles when deployed.
During stages, enemies come in waves towards Azra's position, in standard tower defense fashion. There are no gotchas: from the start, you're given information about every wave that will come at you and the paths they'll take. There's also no interest mechanic, so you're free to focus solely on your strategy. You can pick between using your resources to deploy units or upgrade them, or you can cast one of Azra's powerful, but short duration, spells.
Each stage challenges you to beat it in different difficulty levels while letting no enemies get to Azra, which has you going back and forth in the world map while developing your team. My favorite part, however, was doing Hero Mode, which purposefully limits your unit count and forces you to not only develop your team more carefully, but also go back and forth during certain battles. It's a new dimension to the game's strategizing that I never forgot about, and it’s not hard to lose track of time doing it, as not only is the gameplay exciting on its own, the game also also features an incredibly good soundtrack.
Defender's Quest is just such a blast -- I originally played it for dozens of hours, and simply opening it for the sake of writing this review accidentally had me playing for a couple more. It's an underrated gem of an indie game, and a tower defense game that is able to please even people who don't typically enjoy the genre.
One last thing: older reviews might comment on the game's poor performance. Back when the game was first released, it used a framework called Adobe AIR, which was notably janky: it would take a lot of RAM and slow down the entire computer. Since then, Defender's Quest received a DX version which is the same game remade in a proper game engine, and runs much more smoothly. If you already had the game, the upgrade was free, so if you had performance problems before, it's worth giving the game another shot.
I cannot wait for the sequel!
2011
In From Dust, you control The Breath, a god-like entity with the power to move terrain elements, like water, soil or lava, from one place to another. Your job is to guide a tribe of humans as they seek their origins, while preventing them from perishing due to natural disasters. These humans, in turn, will expand their settlements, their prayers and relics enhancing your powers.
It's a nifty, inventive game that's all but forgotten nowadays. Generally speaking, god games revolve building around micromanaging your humans and their tasks, but in From Dust, the forces of nature are at the forefront, in all their power and danger, with humans, frail creatures whose lives can end on a whim, as mere spectators.
The game features a campaign mode and a large amount of challenge stages that present you with different scenarios, your job being to either nudge the tribe along to a goal, or protect them from impending disasters, like fires and floods. Instead of micromanaging, it instead focuses on the crisis management aspect of its genre, which makes for a novel experience.
Also noteworthy is the quality of its physics and terrain simulation, which as far as I'm concerned, was something unseen at the time of its release. Spilling water will have it gently flow across the terrain, while earth and lava will smoothly settle. With time, vegetation will come to cover the land. With that and some stellar sound design, From Dust's world not only looks, it feels alive.
I Just Think It's Neat™ and I wish someone would expand on this idea.
It's a nifty, inventive game that's all but forgotten nowadays. Generally speaking, god games revolve building around micromanaging your humans and their tasks, but in From Dust, the forces of nature are at the forefront, in all their power and danger, with humans, frail creatures whose lives can end on a whim, as mere spectators.
The game features a campaign mode and a large amount of challenge stages that present you with different scenarios, your job being to either nudge the tribe along to a goal, or protect them from impending disasters, like fires and floods. Instead of micromanaging, it instead focuses on the crisis management aspect of its genre, which makes for a novel experience.
Also noteworthy is the quality of its physics and terrain simulation, which as far as I'm concerned, was something unseen at the time of its release. Spilling water will have it gently flow across the terrain, while earth and lava will smoothly settle. With time, vegetation will come to cover the land. With that and some stellar sound design, From Dust's world not only looks, it feels alive.
I Just Think It's Neat™ and I wish someone would expand on this idea.
Detective Grimoire follows the eponymous investigator as he heads to Boggy's Bog, a tourist attraction named after a cartoon character in the game's universe. In this unusual location, there has been a murder: the owner of the Bog, Richard Remington, was found dead by his office in the previous day, and the prime suspect is... Boggy himself. Ever the skeptical, Grimoire sets out to uncover the truth behind the dreadful night's events.
It's a well-rounded point-and-click detective story. You'll move around different parts of the theme park, meeting suspects and accumulating profiles and clues in your inventory, which you can use to press any suspects further. The in-game menus allow you to keep track of every piece of information obtained thus far, as well as the level of suspicion of each person you meet.
The investigation is made even more entertaining by the top-notch presentation. Each character is skillfully animated during in game conversations, and there are short, fully animated clips at certain points of the game that add to the storytelling. The characterization also owes a lot to the voice acting, which is exceptional for a game with such a low price tag. Also surprising is the quality of the soundtrack.
Detective Grimoire is a sure recommendation for mystery fans. It's a competent and inexpensive game that entertains and doesn't overstay its welcome, so by all means, try it out.
It's a well-rounded point-and-click detective story. You'll move around different parts of the theme park, meeting suspects and accumulating profiles and clues in your inventory, which you can use to press any suspects further. The in-game menus allow you to keep track of every piece of information obtained thus far, as well as the level of suspicion of each person you meet.
The investigation is made even more entertaining by the top-notch presentation. Each character is skillfully animated during in game conversations, and there are short, fully animated clips at certain points of the game that add to the storytelling. The characterization also owes a lot to the voice acting, which is exceptional for a game with such a low price tag. Also surprising is the quality of the soundtrack.
Detective Grimoire is a sure recommendation for mystery fans. It's a competent and inexpensive game that entertains and doesn't overstay its welcome, so by all means, try it out.
2011
DLC Quest is a platformer where the twist is that basic game features are unavailable until you pay for them with in-game money. It's far from an innovative idea, as before this game was released, there were several flash games built around the same concept, which is a variation of the metroidvania gameplay loop: get new ability, unlock new area, except, instead of finding another ability in that area, you find more money, the exact amount you need to take back to the shop to get said ability and resume the loop.
From that description alone, it's evident why this loop is not seen much in larger-scale games: having to collect every single coin in an area, then having to head back to the shop for every single new unlock quickly gets tiring. Not to mention, it makes the game predictable as you can tell how it will go from the very beginning.
But ha-ha, it's criticising the AAA industry and its circa-2010 DLC practices! Except, it's really hard to respect that criticism since, as far as indie games go, DLC Quest is a comparable blight: hideous, low-effort aesthetics trying to pass off as retro, an unoriginal idea done in a flashy, look-at-me way to attempt to capitalize on viral trends, and a complete hack job of game mechanics.
On that last point: undoing the last hope DLC Quest had to be fun, it plays like baby's first game dev tutorial. One of the bad ones, the ones that teach you naive implementations of basic mechanics that are held together by duct tape and prayer. Between unresponsive controls, awful hitboxes and the most hilariously broken jump mechanic I have ever seen to this day, I can visualize the code in my head, and I do not like it.
So to summarize, imagine someone tells you a joke. It's not a good one, but you giggle out of respect. Now imagine they tell you the same joke again, letter to letter. And again. And again. Repeat for over an hour. That's how playing DLC Quest feels like. I know it's only five or three or something dollars. Don't. Your time is worth more than that.
From that description alone, it's evident why this loop is not seen much in larger-scale games: having to collect every single coin in an area, then having to head back to the shop for every single new unlock quickly gets tiring. Not to mention, it makes the game predictable as you can tell how it will go from the very beginning.
But ha-ha, it's criticising the AAA industry and its circa-2010 DLC practices! Except, it's really hard to respect that criticism since, as far as indie games go, DLC Quest is a comparable blight: hideous, low-effort aesthetics trying to pass off as retro, an unoriginal idea done in a flashy, look-at-me way to attempt to capitalize on viral trends, and a complete hack job of game mechanics.
On that last point: undoing the last hope DLC Quest had to be fun, it plays like baby's first game dev tutorial. One of the bad ones, the ones that teach you naive implementations of basic mechanics that are held together by duct tape and prayer. Between unresponsive controls, awful hitboxes and the most hilariously broken jump mechanic I have ever seen to this day, I can visualize the code in my head, and I do not like it.
So to summarize, imagine someone tells you a joke. It's not a good one, but you giggle out of respect. Now imagine they tell you the same joke again, letter to letter. And again. And again. Repeat for over an hour. That's how playing DLC Quest feels like. I know it's only five or three or something dollars. Don't. Your time is worth more than that.
2008
eversion (noun): a turning or being turned outward or inside out.
Eversion is a cutesy platformer about flowers and trees and the sun and happy things. It's just a game where you jump on monsters, rescue a princess, you know, just like your average heroic quest. Or is it?
It's a game with a twist, one that, as soon as the main gameplay gimmick is introduced, could be seen coming from a mile away even a decade ago, even before a gazillion indie games would try the same thing in the years that followed. Nowadays, Eversion feels like a bit of a relic.
Credit were credit is due, though, it's a functional game, unlike many other gimmick platformers of its time.
Eversion is a cutesy platformer about flowers and trees and the sun and happy things. It's just a game where you jump on monsters, rescue a princess, you know, just like your average heroic quest. Or is it?
It's a game with a twist, one that, as soon as the main gameplay gimmick is introduced, could be seen coming from a mile away even a decade ago, even before a gazillion indie games would try the same thing in the years that followed. Nowadays, Eversion feels like a bit of a relic.
Credit were credit is due, though, it's a functional game, unlike many other gimmick platformers of its time.