I’m not gonna jump the gun and act like I’m giving a ‘review’ of this so far, but I just got done playing the first handful of missions in Armored Core VI and I’m just. So. Happy. The movement feels perfectly weighty but responsive, they didn’t try to shoehorn a bunch of Soulsbornering elements into the format, it’s just a proper Armored Core after all this time! My biggest worry was that they would lose too much of the vibe of the older games, especially since V and VD (which I loved, don’t get me wrong) had such a focus on online play it kind of left the single player full of so-so missions and bullet sponge bosses. The build menu putting damage types front and center worried me a little bit since I didn’t care for the rock paper scissors damage typing, but damage types *were* always in the series with less emphasis. The new hook this time is a stagger bar, which according to friend of the site Sophie, is a Sekiro thing will take time to grow on me. I can see it becoming really annoying later on, but if it can be offset by better builds, I can’t bitch too much since a big part of the appeal to AC is when it beats you with a wooden stick and you go back to the garage to figure out the best way to hand out some anti-wood punishment. I’ll adore it if construction and adaptation go so far as to have you build around the terrain, but you seem to have a lot of airborne mobility so I kind of doubt it’ll go there. Still. Can dream.
A lot of the trailers going in had me comparing it to Daemon X Machina, at least visually. Flying robots, glowing red ‘magic rocks,’ but no, VI is definitely Armored Core.
I re-enabled registration for comments and tested the form out, captcha seems to be working so hopefully I won’t get bimbarded by emenies immediately again
I’m in a mind to get more use out of this site seeing as how I’ve re-upped my hosting and domain for another year, even if it’s hard to get traffic to a personal page anymore and I’ve had literally zero engagement on this blog outside of a bot randomly registering and trying to change its password multiple times so I get email nags.
(Seriously, I don’t bite if anyone wants to register and post comments, I just have it set to manual approval. Once one comment is okayed, the rest should go fine.) EDIT I IMMEDIATELY GOT LIKE TWENTY BOT ACCOUNTS SO REGISTRATION IS CLOSED AGAIN
I was about to post about something I don’t even remember now, but ended up seeing I had ten drafts sitting unpublished in the editor I legitimately had no memory of or thought I had already published. A couple were additions to the My Games sub series where I gush about my personal favorites, and I think I may actually end up polishing up and finishing them since they’re not the worst writing I’ve ever published and they still stand as favorites. From the looks of things, I just got started and lost steam or got distracted or something. In the likely event I do get distracted and never finish though, the topics were Breath of Fire II, Wolf Fang, and Black Rock Shooter: The Game. I legitimately thought I published the last one but it just abruptly ends in the middle of a plot summary.
Another two or three of them were overly emotional/personal posts, but I think some of the points from them still stand even if I think I’m over vagueposting about people and being like, overtly depressive ‘on main’ as the kids say. I think the biggest thing to come out of them is just: keep as busy as you can stand, no matter how shitty you feel. Doing something is better than nothing. One of the posts was about how Girls Frontline “cured” my depression a few years ago and that is some hack Youtuber-tier phrasing right there. The actual point of the post was that when I was in extremely low point, taking up a mobile game gave me a ‘routine,’ fake as it was, and helped me feel like I was making some kind of progress in fucking anything. If I were looser with money or another type of addictive personality, getting into a girly phone game would probably have ended incredibly badly, and you could probably argue it’s still a huge waste of time that’s keeping me from doing the things people actually want to see me working on! But for me, it’s just something to occupy my brain when I’m too idle and keeps me from spiraling into a Greatest Hits list of every awful thing I’ve done to people in my life.
And the last few posts were just titles I thought were funny at the time with blank body text.
I leave you with this AMAZING! clip I keep watching over and over of a man truly living his best life.
I’ve been following the Hyperdimension Neptunia series for a while now, and for the most part I’m pretty positive on the experience. There’s a lot of how they approach the series that I really like to see, though I have to admit if I take a step back and look at the series as a whole the quality is collectively… Iffy?
Most of the goodwill I’ve built toward the series is kind of due to the Re;Birth trilogy and VII (just to get this out there, that’s V-short-for-“Victory”-Two, and not a Roman 7) serving as enjoyable, light adventures that tangibly improve as they go on aside from some odd steps back in Re;Birth 3’s battle system. Generally though, each time I started a new one there’d be some moment that made me think “Huh, I was actually hoping they’d fix that.” All of them are a marked improvement on the original PS3 games, though Victory comes very close to the game engine used in the Re;Birth games. VII is just… a genuinely good game. The story feels like it has some stakes to it for once, the ‘combo’ system is actually extremely important and satisfying to learn, and it’s easier to pull off your flashy moves again. I’d like to see another ‘mainline’ game follow up on it, though I kind of feel like the good ending feels cheaper than the downbeat ones given the buildup.
I’ll admit up front I totally understand why people don’t get into the series since it relies on fanservice, winking constantly at the fourth wall, characters who never really develop much, and the entire premise of the setting is more or less the gimmick of “what if we made a video game about the gaming industry? Wouldn’t that be WACKY?” But sometimes you just want a nice big bowlful of junk food, and the angstless, hapless heroines of the series going on quests to fight software pirates and anonymous internet forum users fits the bill pretty well.
The girl on the right is one of the main antagonists.
Most of the missteps the series makes are relegated to spinoffs which almost all take more experimental approaches ranging from hack and slashers to an idol-raising sim that’s apparently so bad it hasn’t been ported to Steam. I found U: Action Unleashed pretty dull, Neptune and Blanc vs Zombies was essentially a cuter Oneechanbara game, and Hyperdevotion Noire was a STING co-developed tactics RPG that relies a lot on terrain gimmicks. (You would think the last one would be totally my bag but the addition of a player insert character always sours me on stuff like this.) I haven’t gotten to play much of 4 Goddesses Online but it seems like an okay action-RPG in the fake MMO dot hacky sort of tradition.
This is funnier in Japanese, trust me.
This is all more or less filibustering the focus of this spiel. Last year was the US release of Brave Neptunia, under the far worse title of Super Neptunia RPG. Drawing heavy inspiration from Valkyrie Profile and coming out sort of suspiciously close to Indivisible but likely unrelated, I was really looking forward to this one. The 2D graphics look really nice, which is unsurprising since the series has pretty much always had cute hand drawn art locked down tight. The end result though, is a game I’ve been frustratingly unable to ‘click’ with for the most part, even as I’m considering starting the whole thing over to try and play it ‘right.’ After buying it on or near launch day I have just shy of 8 total hours of play and am alternately breezing through or getting completely ruined by random encounters, so I feel like I’ve missed something essential in the battle system.
I should probably mention at this point this is a Rambling post and not like, a review. As mentioned above, maybe my eyes just glazed over a tutorial somewhere because IF games just love to front load tutorials including mechanics you won’t even be able to access for hours in-game in codex or full-screen splash graphic form. Missing a tutorial somewhere doesn’t fix some of the other issues I’ve had come up, little trinkets of Jank that crop up regularly enough that they kind of wind up congealing into a layer of Vaseline that was smeared on as a creative interpretation of “polish.” Long load screens, minimalist maps that show you how to get around but not where towns are or what connects to the next area, oddly unresponsive menus at times. Also, on every other bootup the Compile Heart jingle plays in a harsh, corrupted version for some reason I hope is a genius intentional move and the later chapters turn into creepypasta material or something. The voice clips available to the characters in English seem really limited as well, leading to weirdness like Neptune yelling “Yess! A crit!” when she crits using Poison Strike followed by “Yess! A crit!” every time the poison status causes damage, or equipping Noire with a multi-targeting, multi-hit attack making her exclaim “A gra-A graceful strike!”
I revisited the Westwind Valley from near the beginning of the game and found it inhabited by golems that can flatten the party so hard Noire doesn’t even realize she’s dead.
The most obvious change to this game is that it’s been turned into a side-scrolling, Valkyrie-Profile inspired format where Neptune has to navigate interconnected areas via running, platforming, and some limited traversal items like a pudding she can bounce off of. In battle, each girl is tied to a face button and does different actions based on what position they’re in. It’s customizable, but you’re sort of stuck once battle begins and I haven’t successfully run from one yet. I’ve been stuck many times in a fight where my characters didn’t have anything the enemy was weak to or even stuck healing the enemy. I think there may be a touch of SMT weakness exploiting going on since it seems like once someone hits a weakness the rest of the fight turns into a curb stomp endlessly spamming the same move- for you or the enemy.
I can’t deny though that the game succeeds in being very pretty, and I can’t see the plot coming hours in advance for once. Maybe I’m a sap but it’s hard for me to stay mad when I enter a new area like the coral reefs outside Planeptune and it’s so darn nice on the eyes I’m not angry again until I meet a dopey looking underwater knight who can relentlessly hammer the team into nothing because he got a weakness off first. But for those three minutes, I was really into the reef, okay?
Been thinking about game design again and navel gazing a bit about what it is I like about games in different genres. I’ve always had some games I latched onto to kill time, but there was actually a period of time where I kind of lost interest in gaming. Pause to let the reader finish gasping or fainting like a Southern belle. This phase came about from the first steps the industry started taking into 3D- awkward low poly models with low res textures, most devs not really having a base line of how controls should work in a 3D environment, and the awkward steps taken toward making games feel more cinematic. It honestly turned me off and even though I had a N64, there wasn’t a hell of a lot that really caught my eye as a must own. Even to this day I’d rather see nice hand drawn or pixelated sprite art over hyper realistic muddy shootmans and zombie games, but now I have the power to “hey man, that’s just your opinion” myself. Truly a great and terrifying power I use for good and also undermining my confidence and sense of self if left unchecked.
What brought me back into the hobby was the humble GBA. It was basically a portable SNES and since I get into basically everything late, it was an SP with the snazzy flip open lid. Black version because obviously, that was the coolest one. And the first game I picked out? Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. In itself, it was probably a weird choice since I wasn’t super into RPGs, for a variety of dumb reasons from short attention span to thinking it was kinda stupid for people in a fight to just stand in lines taking turns hitting each other politely. I loved Chrono Trigger and liked FF7 (on PC!) but tended to bounce off of others. But I’d seen the original FFT at a friend’s house and thought, “hey, you can actually do things like backstabs or take advantage of heights and obstacles? This is a GAME CHANGER.” So I dug in and I freaking loved it. Once I was in the post game I made it my mission to raise up an all Viera team, because I’ve always been like this. It was really the first time I realized how cool RPGs could be when freed from the TV or computer room and the whole idea of having an explorable world full of little dudes I collected and trained was also very, very cool.
(Never was much of a Pokemon kid, by the way. Picked Game Gear over Game Boy as a kid and looking back regret it a little, but I still loved the thing.)
The way the portable form lead to changes in game design and philosophy is pretty interesting too. Since battery life could still be a problem, some games added “suspend” modes I could never bring myself to trust and others started focusing on allowing more bite size sessions with generous save points or just letting you save whenever. Even getting away from RPGs, I gotta say Peace Walker is still probably my favorite MGS experience since it broke everything into mini stages instead of giving me a giant map to get lost in while resources dwindle. Then there started to be games made more simple, abstracted even more to focus on the core… RPG…ness.
SURPRISE I’M GOING TO GUSH ABOUT STING AGAIN
When my SO of the time and I went shopping on a trip, we each grabbed a GBA game to mess with on the trip; she went with Riviera: the Promised Land and I picked Sigma Star Saga since I’d been waiting on it and hoped it would be a worthy successor to The Guardian Legend. It wasn’t, really! But I checked out Riviera over her shoulder and started thinking “this looks cool but also kind of different.” Later, I got my own copy and was super into it. They stripped away free roaming and broke dungeons down room by room, littered with event triggers you spend points earned from performing well in battle to use. In exchange, they focused on story and presentation, with lots of splash art to really sell special events. It was basically heavily boiled down RPG concentrate and was both perfect for handheld and just plain interesting in itself.
I would keep up with Nintendo hand held systems over the years, eventually getting a PSP too to break things up a bit. As much as I love action stuff, I just couldn’t get enough oddball portable RPGs and tactics games. One of the standouts was Half Minute Hero, and something just grabbed me about the design of it- it’s almost more of a puzzle game challenging you to find the most efficient routes through a quest, unlock all the endings, and all done pretty tongue in cheek. The world is going to end in 30 seconds, so get going, hero! The Time Goddess can rewind things for you but charges increasing amounts per reset. Eventually, after completing multiple entire other game modes, the ultimate final stage appears: the heroes of each time period rush to the finish to save the day in five minutes while time itself unravels the world around them, and for something that’s basically a gag game, it’s a genuinely epic conclusion.
Now this might be surprising to you if this is the first thing you’ve read here but I’m kinda into mobile games lately. A lot of it is because cheapo gacha RPGs and strategy games do a pretty good job of capturing that “vibe” of the random RPGs I kept collecting. Maybe not so much your FFTAs as your Luminous Arcs and Wild Arms XFs. Second and third stringer franchises just always appealed to me, I guess. It’s part getting to explore something nobody else is really talking about and part getting to relay my experiences to my friends so they can go “hey, that sounds cool” then not play them later. Even if they do exist as a front for nickel and diming susceptible players to death and funneling money to China, they check a lot of my boxes for “actually good stuff,” the bite size sessions, interesting game mechanics (well, sometimes) and most importantly getting to carry lots of cool little imaginary people around in your pocket. To train and dress up and poke at and sometimes enter multiple surprisingly non binding marriages with.
On a level sometimes it feels like I’m drawn to RPG things in Not RPGs. The aesthetics, theming, the character building, taken away from the normal format. Like say, Caladrius Blaze, the top down bullet hell shooter where you gather XP items from destroyed enemies and redeem them to increase your stats for each skill (read weapon) between stages. Or World Flipper, the surprisingly neat Pinball RPG where the heroes hop between themed worlds, solving their problems and making all sorts of friends. Bite sized. It’s got leveling and team building. There are Lots Of Dudes in it, and they all fit in your pocket. I love it.
I think another angle to all of this is how to take advantage of the language of tropes. Tropes aren’t necessarily a bad thing for you to click a Cinema Sins dinger at. They’re a writing shorthand and can be useful for saving time or grabbing attention. Anime does this a lot. Especially lately. But that’s a rabbit hole for another day. (Maybe.) There’s a quest in Half Minute Hero where Hero meets, befriends, then has to kill a girl which, like everything else in the game, happens in the course of a couple minutes tops, and it’s genuinely pretty emotional. with minimal dialogue or even screen time. Your mind is filling in blanks and thinking back to other times you’ve seen a scene like this, but it’s being presented in a new and interesting way. That is to say, very fast.
Most of the pen and paper game designs I’ve attempted over the years have come from a similar place. I like designing characters and want people to enjoy them on a level past going “hey that looks neat” and scrolling along to the next. Irrgarten was a dungeon crawler card game that more or less came about because I wanted a simple game that gave people a little fantasy gaming “fix” with minimal setup and the early concepts of Critical Heaven were to basically combine the interesting battle gimmicks from Rondo of Swords and Yggdra Union. I kind of wanted to keep them as card gamey as possible but they keep turning out more and more like board games. What can I say, I just really like the idea of having a whole deck of planegirls or adventurers y’know…
