Recent Activity


2 days ago


LilShpee backloggd Gloomwood

2 days ago


2 days ago



MelosHanTani finished The Final Fantasy Legend
It's Good. It takes the typical turn-based RPG language developed through the 80s and instead uses it as this vehicle to simple create juust enough dungeon-exploring friction to tell a surprisingly expansive story - a story of a party of 4 surprisingly brave people who are climbing a tower that connects multiple worlds. Multiple worlds of other peoples who don't really care about whatever truths this tower contains - they just want to live normal lives.

The heroes reach the pinnacle of 'truth' of their existence, and when faced with a doorway of what 'true existence' might be, they go 'Fuck this heavenly outer space bullshit,' and walk right back down to their town to live out their lives. Roll credits where we step through all these strange moments we just experienced - moments that were told in the fastest cutscenes imaginable, while aware that the audience likely is aware of these situations and tropes from other media and lets us fill in the blanks.

I really like how creative many screens are, and how they take advantage of the gameboy tiles so well, and convey so many space and ideas. The whole < 10 hour JRPG form seems really interesting, the way that time constraint leads to denser levels, denser everything all around.



4 days ago


MelosHanTani commented on MelosHanTani's review of Dark Souls II
@steelybel interesting observation! I can see that being the case - there's something with the early souls games (especially ds2) that is kind of messy, but full of a lot of rough/exciting ideas. Whereas in contrast, DS3/ER are more polished in a lot of ways but they feel more content on polishing certain parts of the Souls formula over others while utilizing more mainstream structures to hold it all together. E.g., while ER still has late game twists (the eternal cities, sky world, haligtree etc), it's kinda easy to see those coming from far away bc of how open world maps operate.

This reminds me that before DS3 and then its DLC came out I was excitedly speculating on its structure and levels.. but alas.

4 days ago


LilShpee is now playing Psychonauts

4 days ago


MelosHanTani commented on AstroboyMario's list Why is this on Backloggd?
good list lmao

5 days ago



5 days ago


MelosHanTani commented on MelosHanTani's review of Dark Souls II
@Sandonoval yeah that's exactly what happens when i boot up ds2 to play again. I think the only way i'll be able to explore again is cheats or something

@rentheunclean yeah ds2 (maybe all the souls games, idk, been a while) felt like you really had to like.. learn exactly what was expected of you. especiallyy some of those ultra hard dlc areas

5 days ago


MelosHanTani played Dark Souls II
(Edit) - So I played a bit of this again. I would say purely historically I have to give it the 5/5 because of how much I played it in 2015, but in 2024 it doesn't really hold up. The exploration is still kind of neat but the combat / death loop is seriously slow, combat comes down to weird circle strafing around very weirdly defined hitboxes, OR, spending hours learning roll windows for attacks. It's just not at all interesting, and it's something that a Lucah-esque rewind function could alleviate (something to let you more easily practice). But that still wouldn't fix that fact that walking around in circles feels awful...

--

thinking abt this from the 2014 goty event.. while i appreciate recent fromsoft to various extents, I think this is their last work to really capture my imagination, for all sorts of reasons. (Not to say that their post-DS2 games don't have great moments of their own, but that's a matter for another time). I think the main reason is DS2 feels like the the turning point for their focus more towards a very specific sort of action which interests me less overall.

Dark Souls 2 is honestly a little fucked up! But that's what makes it good. There's more levels than there should be, stuff is stitched together nonsensically..

The game keeps going on for like 10-20 hours more than you'd expect with the dragon islands world, the shrine of amana, etc... each area feels like this dense zone that the creators wanted to share, even if it didn't perfectly fit. It kind of has this texture of madness to it and theming that feel so video gamey but manage to work as a coherent and memorizable world. idk. It honestly has that energy of those sprawling wild adventure platformers (think ecco, kid chameleon, dragon slayer 4..), that feeling of 'why NOT add a sick dark green poison cave with gigantic impossible to see giants'). But it's all kept so densely knit, just wild little idea after idea.

The thing is though, when I do pick it up it feels really hard to get into. I have a lot less patience for the whole 'die and run back and slowly try again' thing since i've already done that a lot in the past. i should just make a cheese build or play with save states or something

6 days ago




LilShpee earned the Replay '14 badge

6 days ago


Filter Activities