I’ve been slow to update here again, but I have Actually Done A Thing and pushed an early prototype to the Tabletop Simulator Workshop if anyone is interested in learning the basic strategy between commanding cute fighter plane girls in commander to commander combat.
I have a lot of work ahead in making some nicer looking assets but I wanted to get this out there for some early testing and so far I actually had some pretty good feedback so I’ll be adding the next ‘layer’ of complexity to the thing soon.
You may have noticed a name change and even Crossing the Heavens is probably not final, but the Critical Heaven title actually came from a risk/reward system I was kicking around in the very first stages where your units get a big power boost on their last hit point, but it seemed like kind of a complicated gimmick to work around and probably not all that much fun since you’d need to purposely damage your units to bring out the most in them. Crossing, I think gets across the idea of how the general game flow goes and still says “air battle.”
So give it a shot! Again, it’s very early and requires Tabletop Sim to play, but the rules are more or less rock-paper-scissors combat cross with grid movement. Future updates will give characters unique abilities and the movement types will get more interesting.
I’m pretty sure I did an early impressions post at some point, but now that it’s been literal years and I’m still playing, I thought it was finally due to get a comprehensive gush post about this game up here to get it all out of my system.
I’ve nearly caught up the story content in Alchemy Stars and I like how much Stuff is in the setting without it feeling too out of place, somehow. It’s basically “fantasy but also post sci fi apocalypse” so they chalk a lot of strange things up to lost technology being found/unearthed/reverse engineered to different degrees, like the Illumina Federation has straight up assault rifles and battle tanks and the Rediesel Wrench has Mad Max contraptions and hot rods, then random buried ruins will be full of drones, AI supercomputers and sometimes cyborg weapons you woke up by accident. As such, the story has gone from “You are the last member of this species helping the Forces O’ Light fight the Forces O’ Darkness” to “we have to hack the planet” and it’s not been a particularly jarring curve.
(About the only exceptions are the ‘we have to work real world events and holidays into the setting’ instances, they mostly go the Life Day route and have a character go “oh back in my hometown, we do this– focused a lot on the new Longzhou region/faction because man these games love to make up new versions of China)
I’ve had a few friends try the game but always seem to bounce off of it. I guess I stick with it because it reminds me of weirdo Sting games like Knights in the Nightmare in that it’s SRPG adjacent but the actual battle system (connecting like colored tiles) is batshit goofy and in practice looks like a conga line of characters running around in awkward zig zags smacking everyone in the back of the head. I’m not sure how well they’re doing in the big picture given how I basically only know like, one active-ish player and I’m not interested enough to track down a list of highest earning games, but they don’t seem to be stagnating or winding down like other games I’ve seen close up shop, so hopefully I get to enjoy it for a while to come. Ideally, I’d like it to get a Mega Man X Dive collected version some day, but that seems to be extremely rare and that’d be sad. Alchemy Stars is a really unique game and so suited to playing on the phone to boot. It’s not really deep enough I could see it on a console and the way it plays is so touchscreen dependent it would probably suck on a controller of any kind. Then again, I never played the PSP port of Knights in the Nightmare, so maybe I’d be surprised. (You don’t need to be especially precise in drawing paths but sometimes the isometric view or level effects can make it a little trickier to match colors up- which, by the way, I only found out a couple weeks ago or so it has a colorblind/hi vis tile set you can enable that puts element markers on the screen which helps a lot with the addition of ‘dark’ tiles. Dark Yellow parses as orange or red to me sometimes in particular)
The latest thing they’ve added I find especially cool are the Dreams, which cycle every other month or so and spotlight a character by putting them inside a dream, either working out a personal problem or just giving the player a chance to get to know them better. As massive as gacha game casts get, it’s a pretty nice feature and feels more ‘crafted’ than the usual “you raised an affection stat, so here’s a little conversation” payoff they go for in a lot of these things. In fact there’s really not a lot of romantic pandering to the player, which is kind of refreshing. Most of the dynamics have what I’ve described as, “you are the member of the friend group who owns a car.” Characters message you on the computer roughly daily either to butter you up for favors, let you know they broke something on your ship, or sometimes just kind of waste your time. One of the chapter climaxes has your character declare the Main Girl who’s been with you from the start to just be Your Best Friend, and I dunno. Maybe I’m just so numbed to harem shit I just thought that was kind of nice. (Like, seriously, your character is supposed to be the last of a race of telepaths who are extremely useful for strategizing in war, you have sole access to ancient technology including a sentient flying fortress, you would think someone in the Federation would be insisting that you BREED LIKE MAD for their own benefit.) I’m not going to say that the artwork is devoid of fanservice, of course- It doesn’t feel as in your face as something like NIKKE, but some characters definitely have gazongas aflap or rippling bare muscles depending on what you’re into.
System Erasure’s Zeroranger was a game that came out of nowhere and clotheslined my attention so hard I forgot what CrossCode was after years of eagerly following its development and even getting to try the demo in person. So when they announced their second game, I was incredibly stoked for it even if block puzzles aren’t exactly my favorite thing. I just had a feeling that if those guys took a swing at sokoban, they would make The Sokoban for Me.
[Disclaimer: the last one I remember really getting into was either Lolo or Amazing Tater.]
I’m happy to say that yes, Void Stranger is good! It takes a very basic set of mechanics (suck up and set down tiles, shove object) and introduces new enemies and obstacles at a pretty satisfying rate, and every so often it doles out story in surprising amounts for what it is. I feel like maybe that’s not the most positive phrasing I could give it, but I do mean it as a good thing. See, while Zeroranger had a story, it was a shmup first and weaved its story segments into two or three main dumps with a lot of visual hinting. It also did some clever little fourth wall breaks, doing a good job of teasing the player’s mind into wandering. What did this mean? What if I don’t pick up weapons? Can I get out of doing this stupid Undertale battle for fucks sake? Void Stranger does the same but has more time to unpack things and flesh its characters and story. It encourages you to take naps, or think a minute when you feel stuck. Other times, it uh, doesn’t!
It’s a difficult game to talk about without heavily spoiling things, since the cool parts are either going to give away puzzle solutions or just say what happens story wise. I’ve only gotten one of the endings so far, and it was hardly a good one so I went right back into a second run. Even just laying out “You are the caretaker of a princess presumably trying to find her” takes a little mystique out of the opening sequence of “serious woman jumps in perfectly square hole.” One of the great things is just hearing what’s gone different for other friends I’ve had playing through it, there seem to be a lot of secrets and alternate paths to see. For instance, there’s an early game obstacle someone said they got past using a sword, but they wondered how anyone could get past it if they didn’t get the sword because it’s easily missable, so I told them what I did seeing as how I didn’t get the sword!
My only real complaint is kind of a nitpick and mostly a problem when streaming, when in the Void state and stopping for a rest, the game actually closes itself when you fall asleep and needs to be relaunched. That kind of thing always hits me as ‘cute’ but not really helping my immersion or anything, especially if the game isn’t pulling some kind of fourth wall creepypasta fuckery to go with it- hold on a sec
ok yeah nothing seems especially off and if the spreadsheet data means anything I am far too peanut butter brained to interpret it. (splash.png is just the title graphic)
My only other gripe is that you can’t just change facing without taking a step, but the puzzles are designed around it, so it kind of falls into the same territory as getting mad at chess because bishops can only move diagonally. Way back when I played Knights in the Nightmare, something either dawned on me or broke inside my head and I realized it’s kind of dumb to get mad at a game for not having the same rules as another game, and when you start playing on their terms, it can be pretty fun! Or you still hate it, but you hate it for what it is. That said, yeah, it is kind of aggravating when you’re *so close* to a solution but you can’t just turn left without stepping into the bottomless void.
Apologies for keeping this one kind of vague, but Void Stranger really is something you have to try out if you have the chance. It’s only $11.99 USD normally and if Zeroranger is any indicator, you’ll probably have lots of opportunities to catch it on sale. System Erasure is 2 for 2 in my book and I’ll be eagerly awaiting to see what they do next. But what comes after shmups and puzzle games…?
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.
This bug has happened to me before and I’m starting to wonder if it’s repeatable reliably. I took damage while the ships were separated and attempting to change formation, then lost one ship and the remaining two stay tethered together- with the slow mo effect on. It could actually be useful if it’s repeatable but attempting to pick up more items and stuff did instill some new… wonk (picked up a yellow crest and the hitbox migrated over to the yellow ship stuck in the corner while i still controlled the red one and the blue one was glued in place)
Sol Cresta really is a pretty fun game, it’s just kind of wacky that they decided to make a random arcade throwback title then priced it on the lower end of a full console release plus story mode DLCs. It’s worth playing on a good sale. Hope to see Neo Retro Arcade expand beyond just the one title.
