2461 reviews liked by romdocitizen


Nerd: "I heard you like All Stars"
Me: "Is that a Jojo reference?"
Nerd: "That game SUCKS, it's just style over substance"

stand proud starts playing

Me: "Yare Yare, what did you say?"
muda muda muda muda muda muda muda muda muda muda muda muda muda muda muda muda
Nerd: "Oh no I'm dying, please forgive me"
Me: "Arrivederci" explosion

TO BE CONTINUED

i'm a casual player so i like it quite a bit. if they don't add abbacchio and weather report i'm going to cry like a baby

In awe of how many embarrassing and tense situations a nun can get into in a single day.

The backgrounds look like xbox 360 music visualizer.

Man, can you believe these guys put out one of the worst demos of all time. Straight up, named it after Jack in the Dark, an amazing preview of AitD2, and then had it be a 10 minute long walking sim where you do nothing but look at things. Made me think the main game would be complete trash.

I HAVE NOT HAD THIS MUCH GENUINE FUN SOLVING PUZZLES IN A HORROR GAME SINCE SILENT HILL 3

Half the soundtrack is smooth MIDI funk and the other half is the battletoads in battlemaniacs guitar. They understood the assignment. Amazing game overall but I'm not a personal fan of how the collectibles and ranking system are structured in relation to each other, it's getting into Rareware territory. Lots of little nitpicks like that, but the final boss sequence is an easy 'best ever' contender and that nullifies what grievances I could have. Banger.

Put this down as one I've got to sit with in order to give stronger, more detailed thoughts on. In the same way that revisiting CLANNAD was important as a piece of self-reflection and an analysis on my own growth and changes over the decade-plus since I'd first played it, Little Busters! served to embolden my understanding of how important my friend group has been every step of the way through those changes. One of the most tightly-organized Key games, with every route offering something to the grander narrative, and while After Story from CLANNAD remains the personal peak of their output for me, you'd be hard-pressed to find a true ending route with the sheer payoff and emotional conviction of Refrain elsewhere in the medium.

I'm going to take a break from finishing the Ecstasy routes, having completed Saya's, and go back for Kud Wafter in the same stretch of time. I'd like to let the original game sit a little longer, Refrain given time to wash over me a little more, and hell - maybe I'll even watch the anime, because I really do love this cast and their stories. The Little Busters are eternal, forever and ever.

Great BUMP Action RPG, and a great length at about 1-2 hours! https://sylvie.itch.io/sylvie-rpg

I like how compact the world is and how that allows you to switch between modes of playing quickly - trying to open up each room's secret entrances, grinding for money, trying to survive and form a mental map of an area... the game has a lot of playfulness in its secrets designs that show lineage from older action RPGs like Golvellius, Ys. That era of games are a lot of fun, but they sometimes have moments where moon logic or difficult mapping efforts are needed to complete them. I enjoy that to an extent, but I like the way that Sylvie RPG takes some of the mystique those games achieve but presents it in a way that allows the game to stand more on its own as a whole (without requiring the need to look up a guide.) It's a hard balance to keep a game feeling mysterious and challenging without sending people off to the guides, and I think this game balances everything well. There's secrets I couldn't figure out, but I'm proud to have cleared the game on my own!

Additionally, if you pay for the game you can get bonus files, including a design analysis of the game. It was interesting to read this for a number of reasons. For one, the game cites Angeline Era as a minor influence to one aspect of the combat (opting for Angeline Era style bump-combat (you can attack an enemy from any direction), vs. Ys's "hit the enemy at an angle").

This is an interesting thing to see because Sylvie RPG was made and released while Angeline Era is still in development. There's very few bump action games out there, so being able to play Sylvie RPG and read about it was useful as a point of comparison.

In the design notes, Sylvie describes the "Three Modes of Play" idea that was a guiding principle - in this case, "Exploration", "Resource Gathering" and "Stage Clearing". It's three modes of play that many Action Adventures/RPGs tend to have in various ratios. I think the choices the game makes (de-emphasizing Stage Clearing for the other two) work well. Sylvie RPG does feature 'stages' (defeating bosses) but much of the time is spent poking around the screens and trying to uncover secret caves on each screen. These range from grottos you can buy swords in, to shortcuts, to little helper cats who will come fight with you.

There's neat decisions related to this - like how bosses respawn you near the fight entrance, but you start with the stats you initially reached the boss at.

I also found it interesting that Sylvie RPG's conclusions about defense are similar to the ones we have in Angeline Era, in that for games with more of a focus on action and smaller numbers (where enemies often take a few hits to kill), defense items are hard to balance. Because flatly making everything in the game less threatening is not always an ideal choice. I liked Sylvie RPG's solution which lets you get shields, which negate most damage, but you drop the shield if hurt (and have to pick it up, which can be dangerous.)

Anyways, above all else it's an interesting game world to explore. Go play it! Support bump combat

(Day one impressions)
Kind of surreal I'll be honest. Over a decade has passed and so much of the DNA of that made the original DD so unique and anachronistic are being picked up and expanded upon in perfect stride. I'm seeing much of the same enemy types, vocations, locales, brutality in the sheer darkness, quests with hidden steps and branches - shit, the tone of the voice acting, the character animations - all back and taken as far as the little RE Engine can carry it. Too early to give much judgement on the quality of the whole shebang yet, but find it in ur dragonbound heart to forgive me for being blown away by how they didn't fuck it up lol. Probably the most noticeable shift for me is that there's a palpable weightiness to everything now, expounded by the CPU-aggressive focus on physics simulations and incredibly rocky topography. Launch performance has been smooth for me 90% of the time outside of the stop-motion capital city. Pawns are so much like labradors in this it's so funny, they'd jump to their deaths to try and impress you with a shortcut they swear they know about.

Me, pressing the fire button on my laser-cannon at the glowing heart of a transparent dolphin-alien-skeleton while it feeds me power-up orbs over the backdrop of the history of the universe:

"...Is God speaking to me?"