Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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Ninja Gaiden (1988) - Yeah there's no way in hell I would have had the patience to beat this without save states. This is a very good game and pretty fun, but between the rapid respawning of enemies (Especially birds and such that fly in weird patterns) and Ryu's basic attack having such short range this game is one tough son of a bitch. Props to anyone mad enough to beat this on a regular NES, especially back in the day.

I had forgotten that James Rolfe had reviewed this back in the day too...



I tend to agree with his main issues, though I would still say this is a solid game. I'd replay it (With save states) again before I would something like Metroid NES at least.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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Ryukahr has a great series where he plays famously difficult old games.

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Yeah I know speedrunner types and such can be very good at these games, but that's a time commitment that's just too much for me lol.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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Golden Axe (1989) - I've never understood what the appeal of 2D beat-em-ups is supposed to be and I still don't get it. They always seem like simplistic games where enemies that are just too tanky gang up on you and try to stunlock you to death (While you only have the most basic attacks imaginable), and Golden Axe isn't much different. Its a very nice looking game for when it came out at least, but this I just have never understood the supposed classics of this genre.

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Donkey Kong 3 (1983) - Yeah this has always been the blacksheep of the original DK trilogy and for good reason. Its more of a shooter than a platformer, with bugman Stanley being one of Nintendo's more forgotten protagonists. I do like how there are basically two ways to clear a level- either kill all the bugs or attack Donkey Kong so much that he's forced onto the top of the screen, but I found hitting DK basically to be easier and faster than waiting out all the bugs.

The biggest problem with this game is that there are only three real levels that just loop indefinitely (Gradually getting a little harder). I think I went through each one five or six times before calling it a day. Its fun in an arcadey way but it really needed more level variety.

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Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (1992) - Stone cold masterpiece of 2D platforming design. Everything about this just works and is still fun to play today. Certainly holds up better than these Donkey Kong Country games I've played recently.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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Raxivace wrote: Sat Sep 04, 2021 11:36 pmDemon's Souls (2009/2020) - Bluepoint's sort of-remake of Demon's Souls. Its still mostly the same game, but a few glitches were removed (Item duping seems to be gone), a few mechanics slightly changed (The amount of Grass you can carry seems more limited now, in addition to having Weight), a few Rings were added etc. No change was particularly substantial except in the visual department (Very similar to what Bluepoint did with their Shadow of the Colossus remake), though I have to say having a game this pretty while still playing and feeling like the early PS3 title it still fundamentally is does lead to a bit of dissonance here.

It certainly doesn't help that I powered through Dark Souls 3 earlier this year, which at least mechanically is probably the most refined the Souls games ever got (And like most other games in the franchise, reused specific ideas from Demon's Souls almost exactly), but man Demon's Souls is rougher than I remembered in a lot of area.

Bosses are much more of a mixed bag than I remembered too here. Sure there's standout puzzle boss in Dragon God (Prototype of sorts for Bed of Chaos in Dark Souls, but as bad as Dragon God is I'd still say its slightly less obnoxious despite being from earlier title), but most are just kind of lame dudes you just whack a bunch in one way or another while they just sort of stagger about. I expected my Mage character to tear through most enemies, but not to the point where some dudes I could snipe from afar with Soul Arrow type spells. It really makes me appreciate just how good the Dark Souls' system not just for healing (Estus) but honestly magic casts was too, since with even with Demon's Souls Remake's more limited Grass system there were few points where I wasn't more than well enough equipped to deal with (Which makes me think that Item Duping back in the original Demon's Souls wasn't actually quite as much of a cheat as people say).

I'd say the biggest exception here that felt legitimately bad to play were the Maneaters in 4-2. The closest Dark Souls equivalent to them are the Bell Gargoyles, but they have early game boss stats as opposed to mid-game like the Maneaters, and their arena is much more friendly too. In Dark Souls, you may be restricted to a rooftop but you have a reasonably wide area of space to maneuver around. Demon's Souls has you on a fairly narrow bridge and the Maneaters LOVE to instant-KO you by knocking you off (Or you just roll off by accident because hey, its narrow).

So the fight against Maneaters is fairly challenging to begin with, but what really makes it and those insta-KO's feel so bad is the run to the boss itself. Demon's Souls boss runs are a little too long in general (Again, something Dark Souls got right a few notable exceptions), but 3-2 here is just ridiculous because of one single enemy.

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FUCK THE MINDFLAYERS SO HARD. One of these assholes is toward the top of a spiral staircase you have to run up to reach the boss and they are just a pain in the ass. They have a projectile that hits hard and was regularly one-shotting me in Soul Form, but they also have a stun they use if you get up close to them, which they will follow up with a painful grab that almost always killed me. You can take the run up this staircase slow, find the right spot to aggro the guy to hit him from a distance, or equip Thief's Ring so you can get up on him and hope you've managed your Stamina well enough to wail him to death, but it just feels obnoxious.

The run up to Old Monk in 3-3 has a staircase with TWO of these fuckers that's almost as obnoxious, but otherwise is a much shorter run since you spawn right at the bottom of said staircase. Easily my most hated enemy in Demon's Souls, and really the only competition they have are similar enemies from Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3.

I guess the last thing to mention is World Tendency. Still nonsense in basically every way, from even being able to tell what Tendency any given area is at (I.e. different between Pure White and Mostly White or whatever its called), to dying too much in Human form in a world giving it a darker Tendency actually making enemies stronger (Why would you punish people even further that are already struggling?). I have to say its for good reason that this is one of the few things that FromSoft hasn't repeated yet from Demon's Souls (BloodBorne's Insight mechanic perhaps being the next closest thing, and even that is managed through items and not intentionally having your character suicide at specific times, fighting off "Black Phantoms", killing or saving specific NPCs, killing bosses etc.), but at least if you're not Trophy hunting or trying to get any world to a specific arbitrary Tendency its easy enough to ignore it altogether. Character Tendency is a thing too but I'm not even sure what that does.

I still appreciate Demon's Souls for what it is and setting the foundation for the rest of the series, but man I'm pretty comfortable saying its the worst in the franchise now. Still a very good game and I'm glad to refresh my memory of it, but even with enhancements like 8 directional rolling here I still have to say even Dark Souls 1 plays much better.
I played Demon's Souls on the PS5 a month ago, and loved it. First time I played it, and I'm so hyped for Elden Ring now, although I'm not sure when I'll eventually get around to it.

I agree with you about the Mindflayers being really annoying, but I figured out a way you could quickly run past them that worked 70% of the time. The Maneats were terrible but I got past them quickly using buffs (adding fire to the weapon, etc).

The tendency stuff was very annoying to me too, and never really explained. I'm still bummed that I couldn't get the dragon bone sword or whatever that is in Dragon God's lair.

The most difficult enemies to beat were the Flamelurker and Old King Allant. To beat the latter, I "cheated". Whenever I found myself getting grabbed for a soul point reduction, I would exit the game, reload the game and then start from the elevator that takes you to the boss fight with my soul level intact. I just couldn't stomach that dirty move.

Loved the game though. Visuals, environment, ambiance, mood, even the haptic feedback from the controller - everything was great. The only other Souls game I remember playing is Dark Souls 2 (maybe the third one too? I don't recall), but that was a long time ago so maybe I just forgot how much I love these games. Looking forward to playing Elden Ring!
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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Oh cool, glad to see someone else checked this out.

Yeah my guy was a spellcaster so I couldn't exactly buff my way through the Maneaters lol. Perhaps tankier physical builds have an easier time with them.

Yeah I think I also could not get that Dragon Bone Sword thing on my last playthrough because of World Tendency nonsense. From likes their obscurantism but I think the Tendencies are just their least successful take on intentionally obscure mechanics.

I had forgotten about Old King Allant's level draining but that's another thing that didn't ever come back from Demon's Souls (I think this is the only enemy in a game I've played that outright steal entire levels from your character permanently). I actually didn't have too much trouble with either him or Flameluker with my mage, who could just nuke them from a distance fairly easily lol. I'd imagine melee characters have a much more of a tough time though, especially with level drain nonsense.

Yeah when you start to vibe with them, these games are a blast even with the occasional frustrating mechanic or boss. I'd have to replay to say for sure but Elden Ring I think might be my favorite of the bunch.
Last edited by Raxivace on Wed May 25, 2022 6:55 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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BTW I've been playing a little game called Cyberpunk 2077...

I'm going to have things to say about this one, but shockingly not nearly as much as I thought I was going to.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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Oh, you finally got to Cyberpunk! It's weird, I was really crazy about the game when it came out but my enthusiasm for it has waned a bit recently. I still think that it is a solid game with a great ambiance, the story/choices were interesting, but for some reason, it falls short of their previous masterpiece (or maybe "masterpiece" since you aren't a fan of it like Jimbo and I are). Other than the narrative, the real treat is exploring the city, I suppose. Maybe I'll play it again on my PS5 and rediscover its magic.

I should dig into this thread for your Elden Ring review... but after I've played it. Don't want any spoilers. Am I cheap for waiting for a good deal on it? Probably.

I checked out Roller Champions, which released today. Played it for a few matches and thought it was fun! Let me know if you're up for a game or two one of these nights. I tried playing on my PS5 with a friend who was playing on his PC, but while cross-platform "works", you can't invite friends who are playing on a different platform. You have a PS5 so we won't have that problem.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) - Real mixed feelings about this. I don't have strong feelings on the story itself one way or another. I think its mostly unexceptional, neither very good nor very bad, though generally less open-ended than I was really expecting. I know some have accused this game of being too even-handed a look at corporations for an entry in the "cyberpunk" genre but eh whatever.

I think the biggest thing for me is that as a playable character V feels like they're in an awkward middle ground between a more realized protagonist like Geralt or a blank slate like a Fallout protagonist. Its a little weird when they can have you customize the character so much (Only to be mostly locked in first person POV), have you choose starting life for them etc., only for the main story to still be like 80% identical with a minor additional dialogue option here or there. I'm not sure what or if there's a fix for this, but its something I thought about as I played.

I think most interesting part of the story is honestly Keanu Reeves being cast against type here. While I think there's debate about whether his character is justified in his terrorism against Arasaka and such, that he's such an asshole on a personal level, especially to V, is honestly kind of neat. I'm not seen every one of his movies or anything, but the last time I can think of Keanu doing anything even remotely like this is all the way back in Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing adaptation, and doing Shakespeare is certainly different than a game like this.

The gameplay I liked best when I could just play it as an FPS with occasional goofy powers. Its honestly decent, and I think I would put basic combat above what was done in Witcher 3. Biggest problem though is that actually traversing Night City never felt good to me (Especially compared to something like Spider-Man). Driving sucks (Any mission where you had to chase a car on a timer or something was especially awful), having to fast travel from stations is annoying, the layouts of levels is honestly confusing at times etc. I had an easier time once I realized I could upgrade my jump to a double jump, but it took me longer than it probably should have to realize I could even do that.

The biggest issues though I had were on a technical level. How do these still exist. I played the PC version and it ran okay for me at first...until the big 1.5 update. After that I started getting tons of issues- half of levels not even loading, sound crackling into inaudible nonsense after like 20 minutes of playing, general crashing, the game locking up (The Oda boss fight was particularly notable here because it happened to me TWICE against him), and the game just in general started overheating my computer really bad, to the point where it starting shutting itself off.

All of that is uh, real bad. Especially for a game that ran okay before major update for me, and its very embarassing that the game is THIS far out from launch and its still having really obnoxious issues like that. Maybe my computer is just too old now, but like come on CD Projeckt Red.

When this game isn't having technical issues its decently fun- not exactly the second coming of Fallout: New Vegas that was promised but it was fun enough. Unfortunately those technical issues are still there. Like the game will probably be an easy recommend in five years when its super cheap, the mod community has really broken it down, and technical issues are mostly ironed out. But the game isn't there yet.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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maz89 wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 4:29 am Oh, you finally got to Cyberpunk! It's weird, I was really crazy about the game when it came out but my enthusiasm for it has waned a bit recently. I still think that it is a solid game with a great ambiance, the story/choices were interesting, but for some reason, it falls short of their previous masterpiece (or maybe "masterpiece" since you aren't a fan of it like Jimbo and I are). Other than the narrative, the real treat is exploring the city, I suppose. Maybe I'll play it again on my PS5 and rediscover its magic.
Yeah the general ambiance was probably what I liked best about the game. Apparently there's story DLC coming and I'm sort of curious what that will bring.
I should dig into this thread for your Elden Ring review... but after I've played it. Don't want any spoilers. Am I cheap for waiting for a good deal on it? Probably.
I think its fine to wait if you're not planning on playing Elden Ring soon. Souls game do usually go down in price relatively quickly (Especially compared to Nintendo games and such).
I checked out Roller Champions, which released today. Played it for a few matches and thought it was fun! Let me know if you're up for a game or two one of these nights. I tried playing on my PS5 with a friend who was playing on his PC, but while cross-platform "works", you can't invite friends who are playing on a different platform. You have a PS5 so we won't have that problem.
Hadn't heard of this Roller Champions thing before. Not sure its my kind of thing tbh.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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I beat two visual novels over the last few weeks. These ended up pairing fairly well together since they had similar ideas presented in very different ways.

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Cross†Channel (2003)
Cross†Channel: Tower of Friends (200?) - Oh boy here we fucking go. Back when I was first really getting into visual novels around a decade ago, this was one I remember trying and having a hard time getting into before ultimately dropping it out of boredom. I don't like to leave things things unfinished though, so I decided to try it again.

The basic premise here involves a group of students for a school of people maladapted to society to various degrees. After coming back into town after a camping trip that failed to mend friendships within the group, they find that seemingly the entire population of the Earth has disappeared.

Before I can really talk about the game though, I have to talk about its availability in English.

This Game Has Three God Damned Translations and None of Them Are Good: Yeah apparently no translation of this game into English does it justice. From what I can tell, there are three core versions of the game in English:

1. One done by some high school kid a decade and a half ago. Apparently they went on to do more translations of these kinds of games over time, but this was one of their first works before they had much in the way of experience in translation.

2. An infamous second translation done by a man that every independent source I've seen has claimed to have some form of insanity. From what I can tell from the translator's manifesto (There's always a manifesto) he's some kind of alt-right nutjob so I will not be giving him free publicity here. It seems like its actually a huge pain in the ass to get his version of the translation installed on top of all of that, so while I am morbidly curious to see what exactly he did here one day, I am not putting in the time for this madness.

3. An official translation on the butchered Steam release that apparently isn't any good either. Even if the translation were good, the presentation on the Steam release seems to crop CG's, lacks the 18+ content of the story (Most of which is admittedly tasteless but some of which matters), and just generally was not well received.

It seems the high schooler's work is the best of a bad lot, and that at least has the excuse of being done by a kid. That puts talking about the game itself in a bit of an awkward place to criticize as apparently people like the general prose of the original Japanese release and it isn't preserved here. I was bored though and wanted to try this game again, but I felt it was important to say upfront that no version of this game in English seems to be ideal.

The Actual Game: So with that massive caveat established, I have to say I was fairly disappointed in this game. I generally like stories about some mysterious setting or circumstance and how people react to that, so I thought Cross Channel's The Leftovers-esque premise would really appeal to me more. I think the biggest problems for me are as follows:

1) The game honestly does a poor job of setting up basic character relationships, to the point I'm not sure I ever quite got what their general group dynamic was or how it broke apart to such a degree. This matters because it actually takes a fairly decent amount of the time before the group goes on their ill-fated camping trip, but its never really established in satisfying way for me. This is pretty huge problem because the game never gets quite off the ground running, and the whole prologue and most of the first batch of the character routes spending so much time instead on slice of life shenanigans (That don't really tell you much) is honestly a huge huge HUGE slog as a result. Still, I went forward with grim determination.

2) The protagonist Taichi has a really obnoxious "jackass pervert" schtick that really overstays its welcome in the first half or so of the game with how repeated and one-note his gags are. Eventually his character does move beyond that, but ooof, it takes a good long while for him to move beyond bland gag character into something more substantial.

3) The side characters don't feel especially developed to me. You eventually get some explanation of what their deal is but most of them really kind of one note at the end of the day. This is especially noticeable once the game shifts into focusing on Taichi's deal, and everyone else really kind of fades into the background.

Premise Feels Kind of Wasted At First: This is kind of tied into the point I just made about side characters, but I really feel like the cast here does not react even remotely realistically to seeming to be the last remaining people on Earth. Even keeping in mind the stuff about them being nutjobs to some degree, that they spend most of the game just doing the same kind of shenanigans they did in the prologue but in an empty school (Until you get like, a random suicide or someone bringing out a fucking crossbow and shooting people), it all seems awfully blase.

They do at least make a half-hearted effort to repair a radio tower to send out an SOS, but well it doesn't see a lot of attention. In general there's really not much emphasis put on like survival or solving the mystery of everyone vanishing or whatever, which is fine to a degree and I don't have a problem with this being a setting for character drama more than anything, but it made me wonder for the longest time why this game even had the Leftovers premise if you were going to doing just general school drama shenanigans.

Eventually the game does take a bit of turn and some of the characters actually like, try doing stuff, but it takes a long fuckin' time for Taichi to even realize he's trapped in a time loop that resets everyone's memory after a week unless you wait it out in a specific spot.

The second half in the game moving into a story about Taichi seeking some kind of redemption for having legitimately killed a lot of people, having some kind of Jekyll/Hyde kind of psychosis that makes him rape and murder too, and driving at least one student to suicide was certainly a narrative decision. I'm not sure if the game really endorses the conclusion the character comes to (Namely, leaving himself isolated in the "parallel world" after figuring out how to send everyone else home. Certainly isolating the mentally disturbed from the rest of society is not the answer, especially when they themselves are the victims of child rape?), but that might be the point somewhat. Either way I think you can argue the politics here are a bit dated.

-----

Then there's the story "DLC", Tower of Friends. I think its DLC anyways, but I'm not actually sure where this segment originated from and information online seems a bit scarce. I couldn't actually tell if it was originally released as actual downloadable content (Its unusual for visual novel type games to receive DLC to begin with, especially one from 2003), and it could be content from some later release of the game merely released in unusual way for the English translation. If its legitimate DLC though, this is one of the earliest examples of genuine story DLC that I'm aware of outside of MMO expansions.

Anyways, Tower of Friends.

WTF is Going On During "Tower of Friends": For something that is only 15-20 minutes long, this whole thing was a mindfuck in the worst way that threw the ENTIRE GAME up in the air for me. I cannot make sense of whatever this scenario is meant to communicate. Basically this "DLC" is a scenario where Taichi just loses his goddamned mind and murders all of his friends. That's edgelordy enough, but in a bizarrely dark parody of the main game, he decides to take their corpses to construct the "Tower of Friends" as opposed to the maingame's Radio Tower. For bonus points, one of the bodies is mentioned as being contorted into the shape of a swastika* and well lmao at that lovely detail.

What actually is going on here isn't clear to me. This is another case where explanations I've seen for this online range all over the place. From what I can tell the possibilities are:

1.This is just a normal Bad End during the main game where Taichi loses it. Okay I guess, makes enough sense.

2.Taichi killed main timeline version of his friends, they were dead the whole time and he entered alternate world without them. Entire game was him coming to terms with being mass murderer via delusional friends.

3.The alternate world had their own parallel timeline Taichi who was separate from the main game's Taichi. He killed his friends and teacher and then uh, just kind of vanished I guess? I've seen multiple sites offer some version of this theory and this explains SOME details about the game like the blood pool that gets cleaned in the school where Miki "died" previously, and the adult's dead body that Kiri claims to find in one of the routes, but "lol parallel world" alone doesn't explain fact that ENTIRE WORLD'S POPULATION IS MISSING.

4.Taichi himself died after murdering his friends, but the "parallel" world is some form of afterlife where he sends them back to redeem himself. This would make sense of the fact that his dead mother is also a character in the parallel world (Sometimes), but considering he succeeds in saving everyone and far as we are shown, nobody is surprsied by resurrections of multiple dead students...well, I don't buy it.

5.This is post-True End Taichi simply being driven mad by isolation. Okay I guess

6.Entire game was a dream.

7. There is no real explanation for WTF is going here and its just meant to ambiguous for whatever reason. The original game was ambiguous enough with its plot (And really I respect that it didn't try and spell absolutely every implication out), and I'm not sure it needed even more stacked on top of it at the last minute.

I don't really find any of those explanations satisfactory and other than 1 and 5 (Which are just kind of whatever nothing additions if correct) none of them really make sense. No matter which is correct though, none of them really clarify for me why the hell you 180 degree from the bittersweet optimism of the original game's True Ending to this ultra dark and cynical note. Its such a tonal shift, and since it doesn't clarify plot or character, I don't understand what its supposed to add to the game.

Like if you wanted to argue that Tower of Friends exists to raise ambiguity in the main game whether, say, the Crutches Boy really just committed suicide or if Taichi simply pushed him off the school roof to his death, I don't think you need something like this DLC to argue that. There's enough in the base game to put forth that interpretation.

Anyways, while there is interesting stuff in Cross Channel it is kind of a mess overall.

*EDIT (2/16/2024): I’ve been reconsidering the thing in Tower of Friends about the corpse in the shape of the swastika. I now wonder if this itself is another example of inaccurate translation.

Recently I read something online about a fan translation of Kinoko Nasu’s Garden of Sinners light novels and how a similar bit was handled in the film adaptation of them. According to this poster, the light novels mention a corpse being left in the shape of a manji, a sort of religious symbol referring to religious concepts like samsara and reincarnation. However for the official English subtitles of the film adaptation, they say this corpse is left in the shape of a swastika, presumably because the shape is similar enough to a manji and the manji is relatively unknown to western audiences. You see a similar thing with the infamous Legend of Zelda 1 dungeon in the shape of a swastika- it’s supposed to be a manji, not the Nazi hate symbol.

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^The Zelda 1 "swastika" dungeon that has baffled people like the Angry Video Game Nerd for years now: "With the first Zelda, I think everyone agrees it's a masterpiece. Sure, maybe there's some weird stuff in it. I don't know why one of the labyrinths is shaped like a swastika or why the enemy names are so random." (From his Zelda 2 review)

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^A screenshot I found online of the American Zelda 1 manual, identifying the dungeon as "Manji".

This has me wondering if there’s similar translation issue or mis-identification going on with Cross Channel. The idea of Taichi becoming literal Nazi out of nowhere in Tower of Friends just seems nonsensical, but if the corpse he makes is just supposed to be a manji that would create VERY different context to not only what he’s doing but Tower of Friends and perhaps even Cross Channel as a whole, if at the end they’re trying to signify some kind of spirituality explanation for the events of the game and the “parallel world”.

I don’t know for a fact if this even is translation error and I don’t know Japanese myself, but one day I’d like to know the answer on this. I’m willing to bet on it being a translation error.


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Chaos;Head (2008) - Yeah this game was sure something. The basic premise here is that an otaku shut-in goes paranoid as he thinks a conspiracy begins to envelop him and that a serial killer straight out of Se7en has decided to fuck with him, but that doesn't really sell how unusual this game is.

The protagonist Takumi is one of the last in the line of post-Evangelion anti-heroes in that he's genuinely a failure at answering the Campbellian call to heroism for the vast vast vast majority of this game. He's pretty much devoid of any heroic qualities at all for the longest time too- like the reason I dropped this game the first time was because the first several hours of this game largely consist of him complaining about "3D women" as he sits in his shitty container (He lives in a storage container on a rooftop), and chats on a thinly veiled equivalent to 2chan (Japanese equivalent to 4chan). On top of all that he's a stuttering coward who is prone to goofy hallucinations. This opening section of the game is honestly a bit much- I can handle "unlikeable characters" just fine but hours of misogynstic ranting do get very tiring to read very quickly. I 100% do not believe game is endorsing anything he says here- its purely for characterization and to show just how down in the gutter this guy is at the start, but it is rough with how repetitive it can be (It's not as bad as similar stuff I complained about with Cross Channel taking a lot time to get going but its similar issue).

Once serial killings start hitting the city he lives in and Takumi is forcibly entangled with the incidents (Both suspecting various other he meets of being "NewGen" (Short for "New Generation Madness killer") while he also gets accused by others and even suspects himself), the game really picks up a lot. The general paranoid atmosphere of the game and wondering just what is real and what is just another one of Takumi's delusions is really quite engaging, though after a certain point the game kind of just become urban fantasy story. They do try and play it off as "sci-fi" with the various explanations (And later entries of this same series like Steins;Gate are more rooted in blatant sci-fi premises), but here it doesn't quite have the same genre feel.

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^Like this is the kind of story at first where the Se7en-esque serial killer sends "presents" to people (In fact you can probably figure out what's hidden underneath the aluminum foil here based on shape and size), though the story becomes something different by the end.

Similar to Cross Channel, I do think this game suffers from the side characters feeling a bit underdeveloped. Its not quite to same degree and I generally liked the side characters here in Chaos;Head more, but its notable. Apparently the rereleased version of this game- "Chaos;Head Noah" majorly expands on the side characters and explains some more plot information about them too, and while that version of the game isn't available yet in English (It is coming thankfully, but bizarrely it is going to be a Nintendo Switch exclusive) I do plan on checking it out eventually.

Probably the most interesting mechanic here is the delusion system. This game doesn't have much in the way of traditional VN choices, but occasionally you will get a moment where you can force Takumi to hallucinate something either positive or negative. The positive ones usually imagine him receiving adoration from people or imagining some kind of erotic scenario, while negative ones usually imagine him being attacked or threatened or committing suicide in some fashion. Both kinds of delusions occasionally foreshadow later plot developments as well.

Its a neat idea but I feel like it really doesn't affect all that much, sometimes feeling more akin to the type of choices you see in a Telltale game at best that are more about tailoring the story than anything. There is one ending that choosing specific delusions can lead you to, the B ending. I don't understand the thinking behind the B Ending since its locked to a second playthrough having seen either the A or AA endings first.

On top of that how the specific delusions are supposed to lead to B Ending doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I'm guessing the idea was supposed to be that being exposed to a constant barrage of "Whose eyes are those eyes?" delusions just sets Takumi up to shatter his self-confidence more than in a normal playthrough, but I don't get how it leads to Suwa successfully tricking Sena into killing her dad (Shouldn't what Takumi is going through not having direct affect on this?) or allow him to defeat Takumi.

The sequence where Suwa forces Takumi to experience the NewGen killings consecutively from the POV of a separate victim in each incident is an astounding little sequence,
but I don't really get why its so hidden, especially since it actually explains a fair amount of plot mysteries.

Also on a basic level, its never clear to me what the choice of delusion is supposed to represent. Like in a normal game, your character's choices are exactly that- choices your character makes. I'm not sure if the idea behind the delusions is Takumi choosing to imagine horrifying scenario or something forced upon him by his fucked up brain or by SHOGUN or Noah's sci-fi nonsense. This is well before getting into the "No Takumi, YOU are the delusions" revelation in the endgame too and frankly that raises so many questions for me.

I did end up liking this game way more than I expected based on obnoxiousness of the opening hours, and the protagonist does strike me as fairly unique, but the whole thing does feel a bit unfinished. Hopefully the expanded Switch version puts some needed meat on the bones of the game.

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Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) - I picked up that Sonic Origins collection and played through this. A solid game for sure, though I don't like the emphasis on vertical levels here. That can work in a Mario game, but with Sonic I don't like how it just slows you down (Especially with waiting for spears in the walls to retract and such). The last Robotnik fight is pretty whatever too.

Still, even with those issues this isn't bad game or anything. It's just that Sonic 2 is so much better.

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Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors (1994) - I also picked up the Capcom Fighting Collection. Its similar to the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, but with a wider variety of titles (Mainly 5 different Darkstalkers games).

Darkstalkers 1 here plays mostly similar to early SF2 games from what I can tell, though the emphasis here is on a horror aesthetic. One thing I really like about these versions of these games in the Capcom Fighting Collection is that they add in the ability for Smash Bros.-like inputs for the special attacks. That's good for people like that are just awful at even basic inputs that classic fighting games require.
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Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge (1995) – Seems to be largely similar to Darkstalkers 1. The only differences seem to be a few additional characters and more traditional supers (Whereas in Darkstalkers 1 your “super” was just a stronger version of a regular special attack). It’s fine.

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Vampire Savior: The Lord of Vampire (1997) – This OTOH I think is huge improvement. Roster adds in more interesting characters, the game is faster, the specials are flashier. The biggest change though is this game goes from traditional fighting game Rounds to a kind of “lives” system. It threw me off a bit at first, but it’s a pretty interesting change of pace to these 2D Capcom fighters (Though I guess mechanically its pretty similar to how the multiple characters worked in Marvel vs. Capcom and such).

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Sonic CD (1993) - Mostly pretty solid, though I don't like the boss fights in this particular game. It feels like they're a lot of platforming and chasing Robotnik until the final boss.

Also I have to say I was surprised to see this game was based around damned time travel, though I never really got a handle on how the mechanic was supposed to really worked. I just rushed to the end without really thinking too hard about it.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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I loved Sonic CD growing up. In what way/platform are you playing it?
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I played it on PS5 through the Sonic Origins collection. These games look great in their "Anniversary" mode too, having them in widescreen.

When I was a kid I had a copy through one of those "Sega Smash Pack" collections for PC too, but for whatever reason I just could never get it to work.
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Three more games from the Capcom Fighting Collection.

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Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo (AKA Super Puzzle Fighter II X, 1996) - This gives off the appearance of a fighting game where you select characters and such, but "combat" is done through a puzzle game in the vein of Tetris or Dr. Mario and so on. Its pretty fun, but I was surprised to see this title had Street Fighter AND Darkstalkers characters. For the longest time I juts assumed only the Street Fighter cast was in this.

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Red Earth (AKA War-Zard, 1996) - This controls like a fighting game but your only opponents are boss characters, which makes it again kind of a neat riff on Capcom's formula of the time in a very different way than something like Vampire Savior. There are light RPG mechanics too where you get EXP during regular fights, based on your score in a fight, and from bonus stages which is pretty neat. Reminds me a lot of how PS2 era fighting games (Soul Calibur II, Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 3 etc.) and beyond would add in story modes with RPG mechanics.

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Hyper Street Fighter II: The Anniversary Edition (2003) - Of course there's even more SF2 variants out there. Of course.

This one seems to simply be the five original versions of the game mushed together into a single package. Other than adding the Smash-esque controls I've mentioned with other games in this collection, there's not really anything to say about this. It's kind of odd to me that they just threw this in the Capcom Fighting Collection at all when all five SF2 variants represented here are also in the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, but eh whatever.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind (1989/2021) - This is a prequel to The Missing Heir. Most of what I said about the general gameplay there applies here as well, though I will say Girl Who Stands Behind does generally seem to be a little more streamlined.

The basic story revolves around the murder of a student at a local high school. She apparently had been investigating the mystery of "The Girl Who Stands Behind", a rumor about a ghost in the school who uh, stands behind people in an ominous fashion. That's all well and good, but as a detective you've got to figure out just what exactly killed our victim. Along the way, you see meet the victim's friend Ayumi Tachibana, which also makes this the story about how she joins your detective agency herself (Which also means the description of this game's plot in the Smash Bros. Melee trophy is hilariously wrong).

This is a pretty standard kind of mystery plot all things considered, though I think the mystery here was a little easier to follow than Missing Heir's. This also maybe has the single darkest ending I've yet seen in a first party Nintendo game, since your investigation ultimately drives a respected man in the community to commit suicide (Leaving behind a false confession to all the murders in order to take the fall for his own son, which does not even work! He killed himself for nothing!!!) which uh is pretty bleak to begin with and even moreso with that spoilered bit in mind. While The Missing Heir had general gruesome murder scenes and such too that were a little unusual for Nintendo, this ending did throw me off a bit and was just not something I thought they would ever allow. Imagine if a Zelda game ended with Link finding Ganon sitting in a pool of blood, having slit his own throat.

The original versions of both Famicom Detective Club games were written by Yoshio Sadamoto, who is probably most well known for directing many of the Metroid games. He also is apparently responsible of the story of Metroid: Other M, which makes me think he's probably one of the more story oriented creators at Nintendo outside of the actual RPG developers. Other M's story had an (IMO unfairly) mixed reception, and it makes me wonder what more story focused games from him would be like, especially since he seems more than willing to veer so far off from Nintendo's general tone.

Fun game overall. Apparently there's a third game in this series too, and I hope it also gets remade and localized one day.

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^I wonder if this line was in the original game. It would make sense as an Evangelion reference, especially since protagonist is voiced by Megami Ogata, but it still got a chuckle out of me.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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The Cuphead DLC is out and I'm still very bad at Cuphead. :(

EDIT: I've beaten the first two "main" bosses, but the "lol you have to parry these guys to damage them" Chess piece bosses are terrible. Knight in particular is giving me a lot of trouble.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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Really looking forward to it! I 100%’d Cuphead after much grinding. I like stuff at that difficulty.
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Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course (2022) - Yeah this is basically more Cuphead. I think overall its probably not quite as hard as the endgame content of the base game, but I couldn't tell how much of this was skill from my original playthrough slowly returning to me and how much of this were new abilities really helping out (Crackshot in particular seems very good).

The new playable character Chalice makes a huge difference too. She naturally has 4 HP, can double jump, has a dodge roll with i-frames, and her parry is tied to a dash. The new bosses all seem balanced around her abilities though, so I'm not sure how easy of a time classic Cuphead or Mugman would have with them. Said bosses just love spamming so much junk on the screen that I kinda think you need Chalice's abilities for it to be feasible for normal humans to clear this game (The last story boss in particular is egregious here). I'd imagine she also makes base game bosses easier too, though I'm not particularly inclined to replay the base game any time soon. But Chalice + Crackshot did make a huge difference for the boss fights here though (Plane boss being exception and man I still hate the plane levels).

The one exception here are the Chess piece bosses I mentioned earlier. Honestly its really only the Knight I had huge problem with (Even if I thought Pawns were obnoxious). Everything one of these bosses after the Knight I didn't have too much trouble with, but the Knight takes a lot of hits and it took me a while to even figure out when you can actually safely hit him. His fight just turns into a lot of wait him to use the right attacks that leave him vulnerable, which sucks.

I like the DLC overall, even if I found parts of a little frustrating overall. The thing is, while I was going to give this slightly more negative review at first only after clearing the DLC did I read online that if, on the world map, you rotate your joystick a few times you summon a fucking Genie that gives you DOUBLE FUCKING HEALTH going into your next boss fight (Except on Expert Mode but lol I'm not doing Expert Mode). I don't know if that's addition of the DLC or something you unlock in base game or something that was always there, but I would have had a much easier time with this game even with Cuphead starting with 6 HP! This means Chalice can start with 8 HP!!!!!!

I always thought Simple Mode was terrible idea for this game since it locks you out of boss phases and such, but this is precisely the kind of thing I think Cuphead needed for an Easy Mode! It really should have just been the Easy Mode for this game to begin with.

Anyways its fun DLC but I wish I would have known about that fucking Genie years ago!!!

EDIT: Apparently the Genie is a new feature. More information here for those that are interested.
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Gendo wrote: Fri Jul 01, 2022 4:57 pm Really looking forward to it! I 100%’d Cuphead after much grinding. I like stuff at that difficulty.
Getting 100% in the DLC seems to be pretty meaty. After clearing the main story + all bosses (Including secret one in graveyard) I was only at 44% and I really don't know why.

Even without whatever extra stuff I missed, its worth the $8 or whatever.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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Weird that I never knew about the genie thing; since in order to 100% it I eventually looked up guides on all the hidden stuff.
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Finished up the remaining games in the Capcom Fighting Collection.

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Cyberbots: Fullmetal Madness (1995) – If anyone here ever played Marvel vs. Capcom, this is the game that Jin Saotome from that game originated from. For this fighting game the gimmick is piloted mechs- you pick a pilot and then pick from a variety of mechs in the game. During battle each mech has different weaponry, arms and such can be blown off etc.

Its pretty fun, though I feel like it controls a bit stiff compared to other games of the time.

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Super Gem Fighter Minimix (AKA Pocket Fighter, 1997) – I thought this would be another puzzle game like Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, but while it uses same chibi art-style this is a straight up fighter. The only difference is that most of the moves and animations are goofy or parodic in nature, and during combat gems are constantly flying out of your opponent that give you stat boosts and such.

This also has exact same cast as Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, but it adds in Ibuki from Street Fighter III and Tessa from Red Earth. Ibuki is kind of weird since nothing else in the Capcom Fighting Collection has a SF3 reference from what I can tell, but eh I'm not complaining.

Also every time you beat an opponent, they explode like a Megman boss. What's up with that?

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Vampire Hunter 2: Darkstalkers’ Revenge (1997)
Vampire Savior 2: The Lord of Vampire (1997) – These two games are very similar to Vampire Savior 1, though all three of them each contain exclusive characters. Between these two I preferred Vampire Savior 2 since it kept Vampire Savior 1 characters I liked such as BB Hood (Vampire Hunter 2’s cast is a little more boring IMO) and is probably best Darkstalkers game overall. It really does make me wonder why they didn’t just make one game with all possible Darkstalkers characters at the time though, especially because just a few years later Marvel vs. Capcom 2 from these same developers would have like 56 characters.

The last thing to mention here is in the Capcom Fighting Collection, both of these games are left in their original Japanese versions as they did not originally get any kind of English language release. I appreciate having the original Japanese versions for the collection, but they could have done a basic translation too. It’s a fighting game, it’s not like there’s too much text.
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Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (2017) - Been replaying this before XB3 comes out. I don't really have much new to say about it compared to the various posts I made about the game here when it was new- I still strongly prefer the story, characters, and combat system in this over XB1, skill checks are weird, gacha system even existing in this is weird etc. This time around the two big story things that stuck out to me are the environmental themes that are really all over the game, and Malos being a lot weirder of a villain than I remembered- like he's half typical JRPG villain, but in an odd combination he's also like half-Red vs. Blue character or something with the pettiness to match.

As far as technical stuff goes, I am happy to report that some of the updates made to the game are really nice, like all the customizing that is allowed to fine-tune the difficulty of combat to whatever your specifications are.

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While this level of customizable difficulty wouldn't work with every game, it would be interesting to see more try things like this.

I will say on technical level game is showing its age slightly. The poor Switch can't quite handle some of the vast vistas, the game sometimes struggles to reach 30 FPS, slowdown can get really bad when there's a lot of things happening on screen at once etc. I remember reading that a lot of the team that worked on this was pulled off to help Nintendo finish Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and I have to imagine this is consequence of some of that. By comparison, none of these issues exist to nearly the same degree in the newer "Future Connected" epilogue in Xenoblade: Definitive Edition.

EDIT: In retrospect I have to wonder if the beginning of the game here is a giant FF12 reference. FF12 begins with a guy named Reks being played in a political plot and ultimately dying. Rex in XB2 ends up being played in similar plot and is killed, but is set apart from FF12 by ultimately being saved by Pyra. I gotta wonder if Takahashi is intentionally riffing on FF12.
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Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden Country (2018) - I replayed this DLC for Xenoblade 2. I still have pretty mixed feelings about this. The combat is still simpler than the base game's, and the overall amount of content is in a weird gray area for me where I think its too much for a DLC but not really enough for a standalone game (The stuff with having to do the sidequests to raise the community levels really stood out to me as padding this time around).

While I have the digital version, that the DLC actually got its own standalone physical release is honestly kind of weird. I know the developers and people online say this is meant to be played as a standalone but I never did and still don't agree with that notion. To me it seems like the DLC assumes you have some knowledge of the base game (I'm not sure the DLC even explains basic elements of the settings like what "Drivers" or "Blades" are), and some characters like Mikhail are just of weird additions otherwise. Probably the most hilarious addition is that if you didn't play the base game, Mythra suddenly having and piloting a damn Gundam at the end of the DLC comes completely out of nowhere.

I don't think the decision to make Lora and Jin the viewpoint characters really works either. The framing device with Lora's evil stepfather is just generally the weakest story material in the DLC, and I really don't feel like I understand much more about their characters than I learned from the brief flashbacks you see in the game. Really the one thing I wanted to see was whatever the circumstances were that lead to Lora's death, and we just don't get that at all. Instead we mostly have Lora and Jin being the eyes you view Addam and Mythra's first conflicts with Malos through and I'm kind of eh on that decision overall (I think it also contradicts what the base game implies about their fights with Malos too. Really, there's no practical reason for the the DLC's story to revolve their first conflict and even less for Lora and Jin's viewpoints for it to be the lens its told through).

Apparently this DLC was going to be apart of the base game originally but I think it was wise to cut the material despite a few good parts. It just doesn't seem to add very much.

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Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (1994) - Played this through the Sonic Origins collection as well, though technically it only has the combined "Sonic 3 & Knuckles" version. I'll only mention the proper Sonic 3 levels, but generally I liked them. They did all seem to run a little too long for tastes though.

Dunno that the game needed quite as many bosses as it had either, but I generally preferred the bosses over the ones in Sonic 1 or Sonic CD. I think Sonic 2's bosses were still my favorite overall so far though.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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Raxivace wrote: Tue May 31, 2022 5:29 am Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) - Real mixed feelings about this. I don't have strong feelings on the story itself one way or another. I think its mostly unexceptional, neither very good nor very bad, though generally less open-ended than I was really expecting. I know some have accused this game of being too even-handed a look at corporations for an entry in the "cyberpunk" genre but eh whatever.

I think the biggest thing for me is that as a playable character V feels like they're in an awkward middle ground between a more realized protagonist like Geralt or a blank slate like a Fallout protagonist. Its a little weird when they can have you customize the character so much (Only to be mostly locked in first person POV), have you choose starting life for them etc., only for the main story to still be like 80% identical with a minor additional dialogue option here or there. I'm not sure what or if there's a fix for this, but its something I thought about as I played.

I think most interesting part of the story is honestly Keanu Reeves being cast against type here. While I think there's debate about whether his character is justified in his terrorism against Arasaka and such, that he's such an asshole on a personal level, especially to V, is honestly kind of neat. I'm not seen every one of his movies or anything, but the last time I can think of Keanu doing anything even remotely like this is all the way back in Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing adaptation, and doing Shakespeare is certainly different than a game like this.

The gameplay I liked best when I could just play it as an FPS with occasional goofy powers. Its honestly decent, and I think I would put basic combat above what was done in Witcher 3. Biggest problem though is that actually traversing Night City never felt good to me (Especially compared to something like Spider-Man). Driving sucks (Any mission where you had to chase a car on a timer or something was especially awful), having to fast travel from stations is annoying, the layouts of levels is honestly confusing at times etc. I had an easier time once I realized I could upgrade my jump to a double jump, but it took me longer than it probably should have to realize I could even do that.

The biggest issues though I had were on a technical level. How do these still exist. I played the PC version and it ran okay for me at first...until the big 1.5 update. After that I started getting tons of issues- half of levels not even loading, sound crackling into inaudible nonsense after like 20 minutes of playing, general crashing, the game locking up (The Oda boss fight was particularly notable here because it happened to me TWICE against him), and the game just in general started overheating my computer really bad, to the point where it starting shutting itself off.

All of that is uh, real bad. Especially for a game that ran okay before major update for me, and its very embarassing that the game is THIS far out from launch and its still having really obnoxious issues like that. Maybe my computer is just too old now, but like come on CD Projeckt Red.

When this game isn't having technical issues its decently fun- not exactly the second coming of Fallout: New Vegas that was promised but it was fun enough. Unfortunately those technical issues are still there. Like the game will probably be an easy recommend in five years when its super cheap, the mod community has really broken it down, and technical issues are mostly ironed out. But the game isn't there yet.
I'm surprised that you ran into so many technical issues. I played it on Stadia at launch and it was generally OK (outside of one game-breaking bug in which one of the other characters kept driving into a wall outside a diner). Might be your PC, but they should have some kind of disclaimer for that or something.

I'm also surprised that Night City didn't do much for you. I enjoyed the ambiance of the city in a Blade Runner-ish kind of way. I hope they put out some neat DLCs for it so I can play it again.

It's no Witcher 3 though. BTW, did you check out the Netflix show? I like it.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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Yeah I'm not sure what the issue was. It was running well enough for me before that big 1.5 update, but after that is when I started consistently getting major crashes and loading errors.

I liked the general aesthetic and ambiance of Night City during the night (Which is true to the name I guess. For some reason the diners really stuck out to me too as memorable locations, not sure why off the top of my head), but during the day it did feel closer to any other game set in a modern-ish city to me. My bigger issue was more of level design and actual physical exploration though.

I still need to watch season 2 of the Netflix Witcher. Hopefully I'll get to it within a few months here soon.

Happy birthday btw.
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Just finished playing through Katamari Damacy Reroll for the Switch. Fun game. Did 100% of course, which was pretty challenging. The last couple object to collect were a bit of a grind to get good enough to do it.
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I remember playing a little bit of the original Katamari Damacy back in the day and thinking it was like, a neat tech demo but not really understanding how you could build a full game out of that, let alone a series.
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Fate/Extra (2010) – Replayed this for the first time since 2019, though I went with Archer this time as my selectable Servant instead of Saber. I tried to make opposite choices for the story in general than I did last time too.

It’s still mostly the same game (The story differences are mostly slight, though being able to have Archer of all characters kill an alternate version of sorts of Rin is pretty out there), where selecting a different Servant is a little closer to choosing between Charmander, Squirtle, and Bulbasaur than it is the proper route system of Fate/Extra’s visual novel brethren. Still, at least Archer played massively differently than Saber does. With Saber, you just picked her best moves to whack everything to death, and occasionally used a Skill to revive her or increase her damage or whatever.

Archer by contrast has generally bad stats compared to Saber, instead on relying on Skills to buff himself, delay the enemy, and eventually he gets ability to do real damage. He can’t just bring out Skills whenever though, as each Skill has a “Projection” requirement, so Archer ends up having to waste a turn raising it using a base Skill which leaves him vulnerable to an enemy attack. And because he has crappy stats, a few good hits from an enemy can basically kill him.

It's a fun back and forth between buffing Archer and delaying whatever asshole you’re fighting long enough to really raise his Projection high and bring out his big guns, though its held back by Fate/Extra’s Rock-Paper-Scissors system which I mentioned in my original review. It still sucks to die from what is essentially bad RNG where your enemy gets enough attacks in a row to take you from full HP to death, especially when its not even a boss and just some random scrub that gets you after you've been grinding in a dungeon for like half an hour.

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Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin (2022)
Trials of the Dragon King (2022) – I honestly was really surprised by how much I liked this. The trailer made this look like a meme game dressed up in a Final Fantasy skin (With an odd reference to, of all people, Frank Sinatra who is somehow confirmed to exist in the Final Fantasy 1 world), and well there is a little bit of that. The basic combat is an Action RPG in vain of Soulsborne type of games (You and enemies even have a stamina bar of sorts that reminds me of the posture system in Sekiro), though its not as unforgiving as any of those titles. You also have AI allies throughout most levels too, which really help a lot. Its honestly pretty solid combat system. On top of that each character has classes that you're constantly leveling up, unlocking new abilities for, and switch between. You're only controlling the main character Jack yourself, but the classes your AI allies have matters too.

The biggest difference between Stranger of Paradise and something like the Souls series is probably the level design being very arcadey (It kind of reminded me of playing Gauntlet: Dark Legacy of all things when I was a kid). You select a level from a world map and then run through a zone and kill things until you come to a boss, which you then kill. Its pretty basic but effective and streamlined.

The story is basically a riff on FF1 as we all expected (Though if you saw any of the trailers and had played FF1 before you almost certainly will guess what the big twist is going to be), though honestly it was better done than I thought it would be based on the trailers. Like yeah there are a lot of meme lines about how Jack really wants to kill Chaos, but he and the other characters ended up being fairly affecting to me. The end credits sequence even got me a bit misty eyed at the end (With a really nice usage of Sinatra's My Way of all things), which I did not expect for a game I bought semi-ironically.

I do have to say I'm confused on what the hell the overall timeline on FF1 is supposed to be now though. Stranger of Paradise's big twist of course is that it is set before the events of FF1, with Jack ending up being Garland. However the Dissidia games are also confirmed to be FF1 prequels as well, so the timeline should be something like Stranger of Paradise > Dissidia 012 > Dissidia > Final Fantasy 1, right? At first I thought you could just ignore the Dissidia games as spinoffs, but their version of Warrior of Light is what pops up in the ending of SoP and the DLC. Plus, in both Japanese and English "Garland" shares a voice with Dissidia's version of Garland. That all the levels in Stranger of Paradise are based on other Final Fantasy games through "lol dimensional rift" goofery seems to point to Dissidia plot elements as well. But how the Dissidia duology itself is supposed to tie into Jack's plan to start the time loop is not clear to me, if it even is at all.

I should say that the Trials of the Dragon King DLC is kind of a eh overall. Basically you're just doing more level grinding to unlock boss fights against Bahamut, though its kind of goofy because the DLC gives you the ability to, after having cleared the base game's story, play through levels with infinite MP. One of the classes in the game has an ability that will revive you as long as you have some MP. The game is now broken and it is nearly impossible to die, especially because that same class gives you access to a shield bash ability that you can combo you nearly any enemy to death with your infinite MP. This makes most of the DLC pretty lol to just blaze through, though I appreciate that the secret boss Warrior of Light has an attack that will remove your buffs (Meaning the revive ability here), which adds a little bit of tension back to the game as sometimes you will have to frantically back off from him and buff yourself back up.

The DLC was pretty whatever, but the base game was still pretty good. I saw a Reddit thread describe it as " one of the greatest 7/10's ever" and that more or less matches my feelings on the whole experience, really bringing me back to liking janky PS2 games and the like I grew up on.

Its honestly unfortunate that this came out like a month after Elden Ring did, because it is pretty good. Its just not Elden Ring good, but despite the similarities it does have its own fairly unique vibe.

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SonSon (1984) – This comes free with downloading “Capcom Arcade Stadium 2”, I think on all platforms. Its a pretty basic platforming sidescroller shooter kind of game. Plays pretty decently, not too long.

For the longest time I thought the character of SonSon from Marvel vs. Capcom 2 was supposed to be from this game, but no she's not. She's apparently supposed to be the granddaughter of the SonSon from this game, making her an MvC2 original. Still maybe one of the odder backstories to a fighting game character, because its not like SonSon of all arcade games wasn't kind of a deep dive into Capcom's library to begin with.

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Three Wonders (1991) – I got a download code for this with Capcom Fighting Collection. This game itself is a collection of three games, and honestly I don't think I would have played it if it wasn't free since all three of the games kind of suck. The first game, "Midnight Warriors: Quest for the Chariot" is a similar platformer/shooter thing as SonSon, but a little more bloated with its level count IMO. I think I honestly prefer SonSon's more basic take.

The second game is "Chariot: Adventure through the Sky". Its a sequel to Midnight Warriors, but its a sidescrolling shooter where you pilot a little ship. Wasn't a huge fan of this either, kind of reminded of bullet hell stuff which is typically not something I enjoy.

The last game here is "Don't Pull", which is the odd man out as from what I can tell it has no connection to the other two games. Basically you play as a little rabbit guy and getting chased by monsters, and you have to either kill the monsters by pushing blocks onto them, or you just have to wait out a timer and the monsters will leave on their own. It plays alright I guess, but not something I was super thrilled by.

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Street Fighter: The Movie (1995) - Honestly a little better than I was expecting based on its reputation. I think its still really only worth checking out as a novelty though. Otherwise you might as well just play Super Street Fighter II Turbo for the same thing but better.

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Star Gladiator: Episode 1 - Final Crusade (1996)
Plasma Sword: Nightmare of Bilstein (AKA Star Gladiator 2: Nightmare of Bilstein, 1998) - Star Gladiator 1 was supposedly Capcom's first 3D fighting game and, it feels like it. Its entirely sci-fi theme which is kind of neat, though its pretty rough around the edges. The sequel controls more smoothly and adds tons more characters, and while what little story from the original game is continued it seems like more of the same otherwise.

These games are also the source of the character Hayato from Marvel vs. Capcom 2. You may be noticing a theme in some of these games I've been playing... Honestly, the MVC2 roster looks weirder and weirder the more distance we have from the release of that game. Its such a perfect snapshot of Capcom at that time, with so many characters there being from titles that are probably only remembered because of their connection to MVC2 now.

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Sonic & Knuckles (1994) - I am Sonic'd out at this point. This is basically just more Sonic 3, and while its fine game I was really burnt out on his gameplay at this point (Doesn't help how long the levels were between this and Sonic 3). Fine game on its own, but it will probably be a while before I go back to 2D Sonic now.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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Bakemonogatari Portable (2012) – Loosely an adaptation of Bakemonogatari. You basically just run through the story of the anime, though instead of battling like a fighting, you “argue” with your opponents. I remember reading a description being that the goal was the shut them down in conversation, as if mansplaining was the main game mechanic lol.

I wasn’t really sure how that would work in practice, but it turns out its mostly just glorified "rock, paper, scissors" with deck building. You basically construct a deck of cards (That are made up of one of hundreds of lines of dialogue from the very talky anime), and each one is rock, paper or scissors and could potentially have some kind of other special effect (Like increased “damage” to your opponent). And then you battle your opponent and their deck of dialogues and yeah that’s the game.

In practice the “arguing” ends up feeling like a series of non-sequiturs made up of decontextulaized lines from the anime, but its an interesting idea for a licensed tie-in game I guess.

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Capcom vs. SNK: Millenium Fight 2000 (2000)
Capcom vs. SNK 2: Capcom vs. SNK 2: Mark of the Millenium 2001 (2001) – These are both solid fighters, though I think the Capcom side is a bit limited to mostly Street Fighter characters and like Morrigan, and the SNK side seems to just be Fatal Fury and King of Fighters guys. There’s rumors of a Capcom vs. SNK 3 being in early talks and that could be interesting.

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The Misadventures of Tron Bonne (1999) – A spin-off of a Mega Man spinoff. Tron Bonne is a villain girl who is trying to gather up cash to pay off her brother’s debts/ransom, and this whole game is basically commanding Tron’s mech and army of Servbots to gather up cash. Some levels have you fight guys while trying to rob banks, some have you digging in ruins, some have you stealing from a pier (In the form of a slide puzzle type of game), and one level has you stealing pigs off a farm. You have a decent amount of freedom over which levels you actually want to do, though you can also get really into upgrading the mech or raising the Servbots’ stats. It’s kind of like Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker in a way with all the sim management stuff, even right down onto playing as a villain. You don't have to really get into the RPG stuff though- I eventually settled on using my extra cash just keep stocked up on healing items and that was more than enough to beat the game alongside the upgrades I just found through naturally playing.

Curiously, the ending screen shows your game completion time, like it was a Resident Evil title or something. I dunno how big the speedrunning community for this game is, but with the amount of options it could potentially be interesting.

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Groove On Fight: Gouketsuji Ichizoku 3 (1997) – This fighting game was a part of a collection of arcade games I downloaded and seems to have a cult following. Can’t say I was super into it, and tbh I found the in-game sprite work kind of ugly for a late 90’s title. Like I think I’d honestly argue the OG Street Fighter II was a more aesthetically pleasing game in some ways.

The final boss is kind of interesting for a 2v2 fighter. The final fight of the game starts with you fighting the second character you selected with your first, and then the final boss possesess said second character, and then you have to defeat them and then fight the actual final boss with just one character. Kind of neat ending for a fighting game, but it was pretty tough and I don’t think I could have done it with save state abuse at my current skill level.

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Strider (1989) – If Ninja Gaiden were bad, it would be this game. It’s a shame too because Strider Hiryu himself is a cool character in Marvel vs. Capcom games and such, but his actual game is pretty bad sadly since it controls so awkwardly. Strider himself seems more fragile than Ryu Hayabusa or even any of the Belmonts too, which is pretty frustrating.

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Kirby and the Forgotten Land (2022) – I hadn’t played a new Kirby game since Super Star Ultra (Which itself was a remake of one of my favorite SNES games), and man they’ve sure changed a lot with this sorta 3D style. I like the different variations of the copy abilities you can get now, and I think the hidden paths in all the different stages are neat.

What I don't like is how some of the extra objectives in those levels are hidden until you beat a level- if you miss enough of them you might have to beat the level multiple times just to see what they even are. Feels kind of pointless with the internet out there tbh. Still a solid game though.
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AI: The Somnium Files – nirvanA Initiative (2022) – Followup to AI: The Somnium Files 1. This is set after the first game and involves the investigation into the "Half Body Serial Killings" (Or the "HB Case" for short), where basically some asshole calling themselves "Tearer" is kidnapping people, cutting them in half down the center, and then displaying one of the halves of the body in some public location. The game is split into two timelines- a "past" section that involve detective Kuruto Ryuki and his AI assistant Tama trying and failing to solve the HB case, and a future section where an older Mizuki Date from the first game (Now a detective herself) partnered with Aiba (The AI from the first game) as they try to solve the HB Case themselves as it appears the killings have resumed after a six year hiatus.

Mixed feelings on the game overall. The general character banter is as good as it was in the first game, and I'd say the Somnium puzzles were honestly an improvement over the first game's, which themselves were already better than most of the Escape Room segments in the Zero Escape trilogy. My biggest problem is that this game's big plot twist feels kind of pointless to me? I don't mean Tearer getting killed partway through the future portion by an NPC that I don't think even had a name in the first AI Somnium Files, that was honestly kind of cool.

What gets me is the confusion about the timelines not actually being what they're initially presented as. Initially you think all of Ryuki's portions are in the past, and that all of Mizuki's are in the future. You're also lead to believe that the second half of each victim is popping up seemingly undisturbed six years later. This ends up not being the case, and the game's actual story ends up being way less weird and as a result waaaaaaaaayyyy less interesting than the premise you were lead to initially believe was going on, and by like a lot.

Also its revealed that there are TWO MIZUKIS YOU'VE BEEN PLAYING AS THIS WHOLE TIME and that's just such a nothing twist to me. It kind of hampers Mizuki's character too, which is weird especially after how much focus she got in the first game.

All of these don't work I think because they're more twists on the player than on any of the characters. There's no logical issues or anything, they also seem properly foreshadowed to me... It just kind of sucks as a story development.

You could argue that writer Uchikoshi is trying to build up to incorporating "Morphogenetic Field" and "The player is a secret character this whole time!!!!" types of twist for the broader series that he's recycling from his past games and I think that's almost certainly what we're going to see in AI Somnium Files 3, should that ever get finished. There's enough timeline hopping of information, leading characters to know information they shouldn't have in specific routes in both Somnium Files 1 and 2 that seems to suggest some kind of version of that, but we'll see (That this game ends up with a recreation of the Cabin puzzle room from Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors as a bonus unlockable perhaps suggests this too).
As of now though, Nirvana Initiative's big twists just feel very...inelegant.

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Mega Man 3 (1990) – Another solid one, closer to Mega Man 2 than Mega Man 1. I only had two real complaints though, in that not all of the powers you can get seemed particularly useful (I never got a grasp on how you were supposed to use Top Man's power for example), and after defeating the initial 8 robot masters you had to repeat half their levels which seems kind of filler-y overall.

Still a very good action platformer though.

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SNK vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos (2003) – This game was done more in SNK’s style as opposed to the Capcom vs. SNK games being more in Capcom’s style. Even compared to other SNK games I’ve played though (As limited a number as that may be) this felt kind of sluggish and slow to me. Not one of the most exciting fighting games in the world.
Last edited by Raxivace on Mon Jan 02, 2023 1:41 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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Raxivace wrote: Wed Aug 31, 2022 11:37 am I still need to watch season 2 of the Netflix Witcher. Hopefully I'll get to it within a few months here soon.

Happy birthday btw.
Hey thanks! :)

It's been a few months. Did you see Witcher season 2?

I've been playing Death Stranding lately. Yes, yes, it's a "cargo delivery" game, but dammit if it isn't fun, original and an aesthetic treat.

Looking forward to play the new God of War.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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maz89 wrote: Thu Oct 06, 2022 4:51 am
Raxivace wrote: Wed Aug 31, 2022 11:37 am I still need to watch season 2 of the Netflix Witcher. Hopefully I'll get to it within a few months here soon.

Happy birthday btw.
Hey thanks! :)

It's been a few months. Did you see Witcher season 2?

I've been playing Death Stranding lately. Yes, yes, it's a "cargo delivery" game, but dammit if it isn't fun, original and an aesthetic treat.

Looking forward to play the new God of War.
I've yet to see to Witcher S2. :(

I loved Death Stranding and honestly figuring out how to deliver the cargo got pretty involved (I think I affectionately called it a "mailman simulator" before myself). Its one of the only games I've played where traversal itself really required a lot of thought but in a way that was very mechanically engaging IMO.
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Die Hardman is maybe the greatest name for a fictional character ever.
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Glad to hear you liked it too! I'm put so many hours doing deliveries, building roads, etc. Things that shouldn't sound like they'd be fun... but somehow are.

The use of recognizable actors can be a bit distracting a bit, but don't have strong feelings for or against it. I guess I do like playing as Darryl from Walking Dead, who literally feels like the same character.
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Captain Commando (1991) – Fairly decent beat-em-up that I mostly played from remembering the character from MvC games (I think I had an action figure of Captain Commando himself as a kid too). Kind of reminds me of American comic books of the time with its visuals. This still isn’t one of my favorite genres, though I thought this one played a little better than like Golden Axe (Until terrible final boss anyways).

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Fighter’s History (1993) – Bad SF2 clone. That's really all there is to say about this; I'm not even sure why they bothered putting it on the Switch SNES online service.

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Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (2022) - This is one of the longest games I've played since joining Pitter's Place, with its base game being comparable in length to Witcher 3 plus both of its DLC's (I thought it was longer at first, though looking it up it seems I ended up putting more time into W3 overall. 106 vs. 131, though XB3 still has its own story DLC coming out next year. Both games combined still probably pale in comparison to the time Fate/Grand Order has taken me too).

I think my biggest issue with Xenoblade 3 is that it feels like its trying to revert to the dryer tone and gameplay styles of Xenoblade 1 compared to Xenoblade 2. Gone are the days of setting up elemental combos and such, and it feels like the game has reverted back to simply firing off your strongest DPS as fast as possible (And I think it can be argued a Xenoblade 3 character has less actual options in battle at any given time than Xenoblade 1 characters having bigger aresenal of arts or Xenoblade 2 characters being able to switch between three Blades at any given time). The biggest difference compared to prior games is that barring specific circumstances you're fielding a full seven person party (Your main 6 plus an additional "Hero" character that is constantly revolving around. Each character is locked to a specific class which falls into one of three roles- Attacker, Healer, or Defender which are all pretty self explanatory.), which leads to your own contributions feeling a bit limited compared to prior games. Honestly, like in Xenoblade 1 battles are won more in preparation than anything (Even moreso here since you'll be spending a lot of game time grinding to unlock classes and then more time to actually level up classes so you can master abilities so your character can use those abilities on the classes you actually want them to play). And if for some reason you are losing a fight, you just launch a Chain Attack which are the most obnoxiously strong they've ever been in the franchise (And frankly the animations take waaaay too long to get through for the amount times you'll be launching them).

I really think the class system is not that well integrated here. It's fine at first, but there's so many sidequests in this game that become available so early that, just like in Xenoblade 1, it once again becomes incredibly easy to get overleveled. And as you overlevel, it becomes harder to actually unlock classes for your characters- leading you to have to find either stronger monsters to fight (Which means you get more EXP, which gets you over-leveled again) or just start skipping big chunks of the game overall. You can't just not ignore sidequests either, since those are where a lot of plotlines from the main game actually get finished, and its how you unlock new classes and Heroes on top of it. Its very bizarre setup that seems designed to prevent you from ever really engaging with it.

I guess another thing to mention are the tutorials in this game. There's waaaaaay too fucking many. I do think its a legitimate flaw in Xenoblade 2 that the game's tutorials were not very good and YouTube guides were generally better at actually explaining the game, but Xenoblade 3 swings way too hard in the other direction for a much more simplistic combat system. The opening hours of this game are not only terrible with how many basic actions like simply buying items from a shop are given an explanation, not only in a drawn out way (No no, we can't teach you how to equip an ability just by having you equip one on Noah, you have to do it for all six party members), but sometimes the things it tells you to do are like actively bad advice. I remember there's one part where they have to take off an accessory for Noah that increases his attack stat for one that gives him like a measly 100 HP or something. In what world would I not want my DPS Attacker to not have more attack? That only makes sense if I'm switching him to a Defender or Healer class, whose fucking jobs are to either take Aggro or fucking Heal lol.

Exploring is a big part of this game too, and unfortunately this game has gone for the more vertical oriented maps of Xenoblade 2 back to the more horizontal focused maps of Xenoblade 1 as well. The maps are fucking huge too (Supposedly five times bigger than Xenoblade 2), and it just makes everything feel more drawn out. The exploration itself isn't bad (Though I'm not a fan of how being able to climb vines is something you have to unlock in a dang sidequest), but at a certain point in the game I was just tired of all the walking.

Part of the problem with exploring is that even on just a basic aesthetic level, the world of the game is kind of boring. Like the backstory of Xenoblade 3 involves the worlds from Xenoblades 1 and 2 being forcibly merged together through some cosmic apocalyptic shenanigans, and then being turned into ruins through centuries of constant warfare on top of that. It should be affecting seeing iconic locations from the first two games where characters died making tearful heroic last stands to save their friends and such twisted and reduced to like some weird rubble you would see in Dark Souls or something, and yet somehow Xenoblade 3 is the least visually interesting of the three games with the least defined world. To some extent there's supposed to be a disconnect between the player's nostalgia for these locations and how the actual characters in the story don't know and probably don't give a shit about the history of this rubble they're using as just another battleground (Since they were raised to know pretty much nothing other than fighting. They even were grown in magical test tubes and were given limited life spans of like 10 years on top of that, so pretty much can't have much in the way of real culture and shared knowledge). It just doesn't quite land in an impactful way, at least for me, and kind of just reminds me of games I like more than the one I'm actually playing.

Most of this story doesn't really land for me either. The whole story revolves around why the nations of Keves and Agnus have been at war with each other for seemingly centuries without reason, which is perfectly fine premise but all the characters being soldiers means even with different personality tics all the party members come from similar backgrounds and just aren't as distinct as they could be (I can't help but contrast this with how in Xenoblade 2, Rex is a working class guy that ends up paling around with both a terrorist and a prince. In Xenoblade 3, Noah and Mio as characters are basically nothing without N and M as a contrast). The basic premise of soldiers from Keves and Agnus being forced to work together should be pretty good too, but for people's whose short lives are spent on nothing but fighting and hating each other their willingness to put differences aside just doesn't feel plausible to me and kind of rushed. There really should be more friction than is there, at least at first. Yes I know you can argue that maybe Noah and Mio unconsciously remember each other from past lives bullshit but it doesn't make it or their equally sudden romance feel dramatically earned to me. It's a shame that this doesn't work too, because the end of Chapter 5 drama and the final trolling of N is fantastic, but man it would land even better if I had like at all bought the Noah/Mio romance beforehand.

The villains mostly kind of suck too. A lot of them are just generic canon-fodder bad guys that probably should have been consolidated into fewer characters. Of the more standout characters, J's whole deal is kind of forced to me, Shania is pretty solid even if the conclusion is sadly tied to a sidequest, D doesn't work at all, N and M are great Even if them even being able to exist at the same time as Noah and Mio doesn't make a lick of sense, and the final boss Z (Who, hilariously, is voiced in the English dub by the guy that played Viserys Targaryen in Game of Thrones) doesn't work at all. I could forgive most of the villains kind of sucking if at least Z worked as a character, but man he only barely has a motivation for what he does in the game. In the one of the more weirdly unfinished parts of the game, there's not even a dang cutscene in between entering the final boss room and actually fighting Z. You just walk in and suddenly the final battle is starting.

Then the actual ending of the game makes everything feel a bit pointless since we're back to doing Xeno tradition of "Lolz so I heard you like Gnosticism". Z ends up being another Demiurge standin like Zanza in Xenoblade 1, which is why you gotta kill him. The worlds are seemingly unmerged and we seemingly go back in time to before that happened on top of that? It makes all the sidequesting and such and getting the Colonies to make peace with each other feel even more pointless. I'm not sure if even party understands that the weird time travel stuff is about to happen, because why would Taion give Eunie that recipe book otherwise? If it was played as "Hey I know shit is about to reset but even so I want you to have this" that could at least be kind of romantic in its own right, but the way it plays out as is makes it confusing if the party even knows what they're doing by killing Z. I dunno, I had mixed feelings on the story overall despite a few genuine high points but this just kind of kills it for me. It makes me wonder what the story DLC that's supposed to come out next year could possibly be, since I think it would be pretty hard to add anything onto this story that feels meaningful after something that's little better dramatically than lol it was all a dream.

The ending of Xenoblade 3 revealing who exactly Rex from Xenoblade 2 ended up with was extremely funny to me though and redeems a lot of issues with Xenoblade 3 for me, so it was worth the 100+ hours just for that lol.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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maz89 wrote: Sat Oct 22, 2022 4:49 pm Glad to hear you liked it too! I'm put so many hours doing deliveries, building roads, etc. Things that shouldn't sound like they'd be fun... but somehow are.
One thing I remember about that game is just what a huge relief anytime other players donated supplies to one of your roads or something. And when you actually end up with an extra chunk of road from the help of others, it just feels wonderful.
The use of recognizable actors can be a bit distracting a bit, but don't have strong feelings for or against it. I guess I do like playing as Darryl from Walking Dead, who literally feels like the same character.
Actually I like the use of celebrities, especially for games like this where the premises are way stranger than what we typically see from Hollywood movies and such.
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Capcom Fighting Evolution (2004) - This is another one of the more blah Capcom fighters. The roster is weird mix of Street Fighter 2, Street Fighter Alpha, Street Fighter 3, Red Earth, and Darkstalkers (Though its weird having Darkstalkers characters without Morrigan). Not really sure what they were going for with this one overall.

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Resident Evil Village: Shadows of Rose (2022) - RE8 DLC that's taken a weirdly long time since the base game to come out. I think I like it slightly more than the main game, but eh that's not exactly a high compliment. It kind of reminds me of that one Alan Wake DLC in that its just a quick compressed version of some areas from the base game, though I think this has a little more effort into retooling those areas. I generally like the first part in the castle, but the second part having a large forced stealth section kind of sucks (And reminds me of that RE Revelations 2 DLC that also did this except was even worse). I really wish non-stealth games would stop doing this, because it almost never works well.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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Catching up on the last few games I played in 2022...

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Battle Arena Toshinden 2 (1995) – Another pretty meh early 3D fighter. Pretty laggy to get back up after being knocked down particularly. Weapon system doesn’t feel as good as something Soul Calibur either. Its funny seeing these early 3D fighters that they tried to advertise with sex appeal because uh the games themselves are blocky as fuck as expected. There's something to be said for early 3D not aging super gracefully.

I also was confused a bit because this was published by Capcom and I had thought Star Gladiator was their first 3D fighter, but this clearly came first. I guess Capcom must have only published this game though and not developed it themselves as with Star Gladiator.

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Planetarian (2004) - This VN is basically about a scavenger guy in a post-apocalyptic Earth coming across an android girl who is still working at an abandoned planetarium like 30 years after the world went to hell. The guy is initially annoyed by the robot's seemingly not realizing the apocalypse happened, but agrees to help her repair the planetarium's broken projector. It's a nice, short and sweet tearjerker (I think my playtime to finish the whole thing was like 3 hours, and I think I left the game on at one part for some reason), and while a lot of VN's tend to be epic in length sometimes there's something to be said for a solid short story. The android character makes me wonder if the whole thing is an allegory for Alzheimers or something.

While I know Key makes a lot of bittersweet stories, I was surprised at just how dark the ending here ended up being. The android character was dead the other guy is pretty much moments away from being killed himself. Supposedly there's some kind of anime adaptation that softens this ending somewhat, though I like how it plays out here.

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Higurashi When They Cry Rei (2006) – This finally got an official English release earlier in the year. It contains three mini arcs: Saikaroshi, which is a nice little epilogue to the main series of VN's, and Hirukowashi and Batsukoishi which are more comedy focused and frankly the less said about them them the better.

Still, Saikaroshi is the main attraction here and is pretty solid. The whole idea of Rika's winning state in Matsuribayashi mostly being ideal for her and not her friends and certainly not her murdered parents is honestly interesting notion to explore and far better way to reconsider the story than all the nonsense that Gou/Sotsu tried to pull. It's also just generally stronger ending too than Matsurihayashi, which as an ending was way to optimistic considering what the story started as. Saikaroshi still being positive but relatively nuanced reflection on an alternative outcome that could have been explored is interesting.

I will say I don't buy the argument in these scenes that Rika is like, spoiled or whatever though. Homegirl just spent a century watching her friends go crazy, die, and then getting murdered herself. I think she's allowed to have a few indulgences.


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Queen Beast (2022) - A rare Western VN that I mostly enjoyed. Really captures the mood of 90's Fantasy OVAs well, even if story is kinda a generic (A girl is captured, her brother has to go rescue her). For a game that's free, I think the production values I generally decent but if this were a paid title I would expect a little more from some of the actual in-game sprite work (Though the poster above is pretty solid IMO).

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Fallout 4 (2015) - It's been a while since I've been as down the middle on an RPG as this one. The combat is improved from past game games, and the graphics are certainly the best of any of these Bethesda titles. I can't decide if I actually like it more or less than Fallout 3 or Skyrim though. The main story just seems kind of...uninspired? Like its very much Invasion of the Body Snatchers kind of thing (With bits of Blade Runner thrown in, though also lifted from fairly obscure Fallout 3 quest), and not much more.

There's also the "personal" angle of being a parent finding their lost child (You can tell this is made at the height of the "dad game" trend of a few years ago. Fallout 4 gets away with this a little I think because they're trying to invert Fallout 3's premise of a child looking for their missing father.), though I find it kind of forced the way they explore this. Like the game begins with you living in America before the bombs dropped, escaping to a Vault and getting cryogenically frozen, being temporarily unfrozen (You even have some control through this segment!) just to see some bad guy come in, kill your spouse, and take your baby and then being frozen again. You're finally unfrozen a second time and your character makes it their mission to find their kidnapped baby in this new post-apocalyptic wasteland but uh. They spend nearly this whole game thinking they're looking for a baby. It doesn't occur for the longest time that they could have been unfrozen long after their baby's kidnapping and it's just contrived. There's really no reason not to make the character assume this Except to hide the obvious plot twist of "lol baby is an old man now and also they're the leader of the bad guys". Perfectly acceptable twist but Fallout 4 doesn't do much with it. but the character would have been much more sympathetic if they or if the player was allowed to even consider the possibility in dialogue options that they have no idea how old the person they're looking for even is now, or if they're even still alive for that matter.

This game kind of has same problem Cyberpunk 2077 did to me in there's somewhat of a disconnect between the player being customizable and the character having a predetermined backstory except it's even worse here. Your create a character is always looking for their baby, no matter what. Like there's a huge disconnect between the player character in the dialogue scenes, and the fact that I can gain a cannibal perk , shoot my old man son in the head later on when I meet him, and then eat his fuckin' corpse to restore my HP. Like its rad that the game can let you do that I guess, but unlike New Vegas' Courier, who had fairly mutable past at most, there seems to be a total disconnect between the story the devs wanted to tell and the few RPG elements that still exist here.

Also I have to be honest, as well as its rendered here the setting being post-apocalyptic...Boston, of all places, is kind of whatever. I mean I have nothing against Boston, one of my favorite Survivor players is from Boston, but its not quite as interesting a setting as Washington D.C. or the Mojave Wasteland. The map itself is fine and decently sized, but the theming is a bit blah to me.

I think I'm kind of burned out on open worlds now because I didn't find motivation to hit the side quests too hard here. None of the big NPC factions were really grabbing me. I think the people that will like this game most have to be very into micromanaging settlements and such, because man there is a lot of that here and to me it seemed very finnicky. It's like the Hearthstone DLC for Skyrim on crack, and I'm about as into this as I was that.

Of course there is DLC to mention. Love the promotional art for these btw.

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Automatron (2016) - Yeah I don't know, there's something here about robots going around killing people or something? This doesn't have its own map or anything and is mostly kind of tedious dungeon crawling. The customizable robot companions thing is kind of neat but wasn't something I was super interested in.

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Far Harbor (2016) - This was kind of a retreat of Point Lookout from Fallout 3, in that its about coming to a spooky island to find a missing person. Still the island was cool, was a little more RPG-y than the main game, and I kind of wish it was attached to a game I generally liked more than Fallout 4.

The Synth stuff is also more interesting here than in the main quest of the base game.

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Nuka-World (2016) - I don't quite know why there's a post-apocalyptic Disney World stand-in (And themed around the fictional Coca-Cola stand-in instead of like, the Vault Boy) for a game set in Boston, but its here and its kind of neat. I like the different areas of the park you explore, the different factions here, the different kinds of problems you encounter like the weird magician guy etc. I was initially excited for the option you get here to become a Raider or whatever to allow you conquer all the settlements in Boston more or less, but eh it ended just being a lot of the same micromanaging you would do with the normal factions anyways.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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BTW does anyone know what the deal with Fallout 76 is supposed to be? It's the last of these modern Fallout games I've yet to play, and while it seems to have a very low reputation from people I'm not exactly sure why that is.
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Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (1987) - Yeeaaaahhhh this might be my pick for the worst Zelda. I didn't get why it had a bad reputation at first (And was hoping most of the outrage was just fanboys that couldn't handle a franchise entry being different), because the first Temple or so seemed fine. But after that the game quickly gets more difficult and never really lets up. Even with abusing save states on NSO version, these enemies just never let up with attacks and I had trouble seeing any sort of pattern with them. Link has little range with his dinky little sword, whereas enemies and can move and attack, guard and attack, spam projectiles like there's no end, and are just insanely aggressive. I know people argue this game is technically "fair" since technically you can dodge or block most attacks thrown at you but it seems a little unreasonable here. Especially with how severe punishments for dying are in this game if you're not abusing save states.

I also have to say the Magic system doesn't quite work IMO. You never seem to have enough MP to really experiment with the Magic you get, and on top of that the enemies being so aggressive means you will being taking a lot of damage and you will be using your MP on your Heal spell...which is fine, except a lot of the Metroidvania-esque roadblocks are tied to Spells instead of just items, which means you can be blocked on progressing through a Temple due to lack of MP meaning you can't use your Jump spell or the one to turn Link into a Fairy or whatever. It's just kind of obnoxious, and this is assuming you're playing with a guide and even found the Spells you needed which are otherwise hidden in the world in an arcane Zelda 1-esque fashion.

In general its a game that's more frustrating than fun IMO. It does have some good music and clearly inspired many elements in the franchise going forward (A lot of Ocarina of Time's story elements seem pulled from this game, strangely enough. Link's downward sword thrust from Super Smash Bros. also originates here). I kind of wish there was a refined version of this gameplay going forward because there's kernel of an good idea buried underneath not only dated gameplay but even bad for its time elements (People compared this game to Castlevania II: Simon's Quest a lot and I get why, but really the 2D platforming sections reminded me more of Castlevania 1. That is, if Castlevania 1 was done poorly. You've got enemies throwing weapons in an arch, enemies flying in a wave sign, infinitely spawning enemies etc. The thing is that Simon Belmont, despite his weaknesses, has A LOT of utility that Link is almost completely lacking while some the tools he does have he's disincentivized from even using). I kind of wish Nintendo tried this gameplay style a second time because it probably could be made good, but eh oh well.


^It does seem there's a lot of differences between the original Japanese version of the game and the American version btw. I prefer most of the changes the American version made, but it would have been nice to be able to kill Tektikes just using the sword as you can in the Japanese version. Also, its interesting that there's an entire boss in the American version that doesn't exist in the Japanese version.


^Also, for nostalgia's sake I can't help but post the AVGN's old episode about Zelda II. He's more positive on the game than I am, but I still get a chuckle out of this.
Last edited by Raxivace on Fri Feb 03, 2023 7:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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I'll be playing what looks to be a much better Zelda game next:

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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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Always loved that ad for Zelda 3. Never seen a video of it with English subtitles before though! Anyway, I've always loved A Link to the Past. I remember going through and 100%ing it as a kid, and then working to beat it with 0 deaths (it shows your total death count at the end of the credits). Several years ago, I got into the LTTP Randomizer and played that a bunch.
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I've only really played a randomizer for Resident Evil 2 Remake and I think I turned one on for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night once, but they're pretty neat. Really adds back some sense of discovery and some neat challenge to a game you know really well.
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The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991) - Yeah this is one of those games that does what it wants to do so perfectly its almost hard to talk about. I had played a bit of the GBA version when I was younger but I never got too far into it for some reason. Maybe I was comparing too much to later games I think I prefer a little more even now, but man I have huge appreciation for this after playing Zelda 1 and 2. It's just smooth and fun in a way those games really weren't for me. I'd go as far as saying this is probably one of the five or so SNES games that hold up the best.

I guess if I had to nitpick a few things, its that there is a major story elements that aren't clear to me (Are Ganon and Aghanim the same person or not? The names being similar might be a hint that they are (And would match what Ganon says about Aghanim being his "alter ego"), but that makes the exposition we get about how "lol Ganon can't enter the Light World" just seem to be incorrect if that's the case. What are we actually doing in this story then?). There are few minor mechanical things too- like sometimes I would create a portal to the Light World, walk through it, but then get caught in a loop where I immediately enter back into the portal into the Dark World. The main menu could be a little annoying sometimes too if I accidentally selected my bottles and their submenu when I didn't mean to. Hardly game ruining flaws or anything, but it happened enough to be notable.

EDIT: Oh yeah the minigame where you had to dig a bunch of holes to find a Heart Piece sucked too. Again hardly fatal flaw, but it sucks that the Heart Piece's location is randomized.

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The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Anniversary Edition (2002/2011) - I had the GBA version of Four Swords that came with the GBA port of LTTP when I was younger, but I well it was struggle to every find somebody to play that with. I recently found out about the expanded port of Four Swords that came out for DSiware years ago...except it was only available for download for an extremely limited time online for what I can tell. I tried downloading a rom to play on my R4, except DSiware doesn't work on R4 cards it turns out. I didn't want to go through the effort of modding my 3DS for a single game I was only going to spend maybe a few hours on, so I was forced to to turn to an emulator. Thankfully this game plays decently with a controller, but its absolutely bizarre that a Zelda game took that this much effort to get playing.

Anyways I'm glad the Anniversary Edition here added in a Single Player mode that was not available on the GBA version back in the day, but I honestly I think multiplayer is probably where this game shines best. By yourself you just have a janky, arcadey 2D Zelda that's a bit blah. I'm glad its fairly short, at least if you're just rushing through what little main story there is here. The randomized levels are an interesting touch I guess, though I'm glad I didn't have to play through all of them just to get to Vaati. This version also adds bonus levels based on Link to the Past, Link's Awakening, and Zelda 1. I played a few of the LTTP levels (Which use original sprites and music from that game), but they were kind of obnoxious with their combat focus IMO and I nope'd out of them after about 20 minutes. Again, kind of thing that would probably be fun with friends but on my own was just a slog.

I also don't think I realized this before, but the original Four Swords seems to have been developed by Capcom, much like Oracles of Ages/Seasons and Minish Cap. Its honestly still kind of weird to me that they of all companies did several Zelda games.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

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Four Swords is one of the very few only Zelda games I've never played. Just never had a chance to. Maybe now that they're adding GBA to Switch I'll have the chance some day.

On Twitch/YouTube, BarberousKing has started a Zelda marathon; I just finished watching his playthrough of Zelda 1 second quest, and it was excellent content.
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Since we got the GBA version of SMB3 already, I'd be surprised if we don't get the GBA LTTP/Four Swords pak as well. That would almost certainly be the definitive way to play Four Swords.
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The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Master Quest (1998/2002) - It took me 20 years but I finally beat this. And I mean that literally.

I actually started out replaying this from the beginning, but I had forgotten just how much of Master Quest really draws things out with having to revisit even the earliest dungeons just for Golden Skullutas and the like. It was looking to require a much longer amount of time that I was really looking to put into a Zelda game at the moment (And I've been kinda worried about getting Zelda'd out before Tears of the Kingdom comes out), but then I remembered I still had my abandoned save file from my childhood on a memory card, from when I first got this game like 20 years ago. I decided to load that up and I was pretty close to the end- I only had the Spirit Temple left, and that was like 75% done as it was. I decided to just power through the end of this file. It made me feel like Link himself in a way, going to back to complete some unfinished business from my youth, though I suppose 20 years is a fair bit longer than 7.

OoT is still good from what I remember and what I played here, and the Master Quest changes range from interesting to frustrating. Having Adult Link spawn a chest for Child Link to find in the Spirit Temple is still a bizarre bit of game logic, and the Fire Temple room in Ganon's Tower is one of my least favorite things period now, especially that Silver Rupee you have to fall onto one of the Golden Gauntlet pillars to obtain. Probably the most memorable change to me even now though are the addition of the cows to Lord Jabu Jabu's belly.

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I mean what the fuck. Even now they look half digested to me, and there are a lot of these cows in him now.

The only other thing I have to mention really is that I had trouble aiming with the slingshot and bow a lot this time around. I don't know if this is a sign of my age, a flaw OoT already had, or a quirk of the GameCube ports or a flaw with the converter I was using to get my GameCube to run on my TV but I do not remember it being so hard to do something like the shooting gallery minigame. There was a part in the Spirit Temple too where you had to quickly light three torches with Fire Arrows and I struggled for the longest getting the aim right on those for quite a while. I did get it eventually but it felt way too finicky.

I think in the future I'll go back to the original N64 version for OoT, but it was nice to finally knock Master Quest off the list. Kinda wish I hadn't "cheated" by going back to an old save file but eh whatever. For the time being I think I need a break from Zelda now for a bit before TotK arrives.
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Also if I remember right I think this is the first GameCube release I've reviewed since joining this forum (Well even if it is a glorified port of N64 games). That's a little surprising to me tbh, since the GameCube had a huge impact on me growing up but we don't really talk about many of its titles here.
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Resident Evil 4 "Chainsaw Demo" (2023) - The demo for the RE4 remake has been out for a few days now and it rules. I really like the changes they've made here based on the opening village section- Leon might not be quite as overpowered as he was in the OG RE4 where you could just blast away everything or shoot to set up overpowered melee attacks, but he's still pretty strong and has more options in general. You can crouch and sneak! Your knife now isn't just a purely defensive or purely offensive- you can use it to parry enemies to set up melee attacks which adds a lot of interesting strategies options (Though your knife has durability so you need to be careful. It's also nice way of using mechanics to show Leon's evolution since the RE2 Remake). In turn enemies are stronger and seem a little smarter with how they horde you now in the game, so you have make full use of your available options.

I really just want to play the full game now. If demo keeps up this level of quality (And I think it likely will), this will nicely redeem Capcom for me after the RE3 Remake and Village.

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Xenoblade Chronicles X (2015) - I didn't think I would ever get a chance to play this unless it got ported to another system, however I got a new laptop recently that is apparently strong enough to emulate Wii U games (With only a few minor glitches and crashes at times). So this will be probably the only genuine Wii U game I ever post about.

This is a spinoff from main Xenoblade series. The basic premise follows the survivors of humanity fleeing from the destruction of the Earth, being chased by a race of aliens called the Ganglion. They end up crashing their spaceship on a planet called Mira, where the humans have decided to try and set up a colony, trying to peacefully coexist with some of the aliens already there while searching for a missing piece of their ship called the "Lifehold". We're told early on that the Lifehold contains most of the passengers of the ship which have been cryogenically frozen (Though there's still enough awake people to basically recreate and operate Los Angeles, very creatively calling the city New Los Angeles. Yes, hilariously enough the characters in this game are Americans). However the Ganglion have arrived on Mira too and are seeking the Lifehold for mysterious reasons...

It's a very Halo-ish kind of story really, far more plot driven than the mainline Xenoblade games though I enjoyed the story well enough. The gameplay is like a mix of Xenoblade 1's combat (Though with class system for on foot battles that is similar to one Xenoblade 3 would use. Unlike Xenoblade 3 however, I don't think you're incentivized to constantly be switching classes. Its totally fine to stick with one you happen to like, or at least simply go down one particular class chain.) and Xenogears, in that eventually you can buy mechs called Skells for your characters and customize them with different weapons and armor and such. Otherwise you're just exploring the planet of Mira, since this is open world game and the planet itself is pretty fun environment. Really kind of brought me back to playing Breath of the Wild in some ways, which I guess is why MonolithSoft staff was brought on to help finish BotW.

The music is also a high point in this game to me. Sawano's OST here is very different from the music of the other games, but I like his huge bombastic style and it really brought me back to watching other things he's done the score for like Kill la Kill and Gundam Unicorn. It was often fun to run into some weird strong monster in the world and hear those vocals in music come in. That's how you know shit was about to get serious.

However, despite all of these many positives this wouldn't be a Xeno game without some weird jank. There are a couple times where I would get shot at by enemies through walls and such, but I think the worst is that the game just puts weird checkpoints on you from time to time. Like oftentime story mission requirements will be something like exploring some arbitrary percentage of some section of Mira (Which is fine I guess, that's generally what you play this game for), though other time missions will be locked around also having done side missions. And those side missions are sometimes locked behind raising affinity for characters in battle. If you're like me, you probably just mainly used the create a character MC, Elma, Lin, and whoever your favorite fourth character happened to be for your party until you find out the game expects you to have been juggling people around more often. This is easy trap to fall into, and wouldn't be so bad if affinity wasn't kind to slow to raise.

I think other problem is that there's pretty sizeable difficulty spike for the last boss gauntlet. I got up to the ending without much trouble, but I think I could not put the last boss down at level 48ish with my level 30 Skells I had bought and because I had saved after accepting the story mission I couldn't actually cancel it and take on a lot of other side missions to reap the rewards from those (I get why the game does this for story reasons and for the minor continuity of the world it has but still). I read on internet that people said to buy level 50 skells, which I wanted to do except they were far more expensive than the level 30 Skells and grinding money before the endgame is huge slog. You were expect I think to set up more probes across the planet to farm money (Of which you get free money every 10 minutes or so) as you play the game I guess. I thought I had been doing enough of that but its really only right at end game that I started really running into issues, so I had to grind other enemies for drops which I could then sell for cash so I could then buy the level 50 Skell. This also brought my party to the max level of 60, which is odd number for a game.

Thing is, my fucking insurance policy on one of my Skells ran out in this process from getting destroyed too many times so I guess the NLA government just refused to repair it for free anymore, so I had to pay an absurd amount of money to get that one repaired too. Which meant more grinding. Often during grinding, my Skells ran out of damn fuel a lot too (Similar to Xenogears' mecha mechanics really), so I had to either spend other resources to get more fuel for them so I could grind these high level monsters, or I had to wait for them to refuel naturally on a timer (Which takes forever to get a decent amount). Fuel wasn't really too much of a problem throughout most of the game, but once you get the flight module for your Skell or start grinding a fair amount, you start blowing through it much more quickly.

But I finally got to level 60, had level 60 equipment from the enemies I was grinding (Which I had been previously selling obviously), and one level 50 Skell and three level 30 Skells in my party. After that I curbstomped the final boss.

It's been a longtime since I had to actually grind to beat a JRPG, and its pretty unfortunate that this happened right at the end. This is still my second favorite Xeno game overall right behind Xenoblade 2, though I'd imagine a "Definitive Edition" port for the Switch or something would clean up a lot of the game's issues. Like did this game really need fuckin' insurance policies as a game mechanic? Did fuel?
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