Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2021 Games Thread

[Raxivace]

Played through a bunch of stuff recently to try and (mostly) clear my slate before FF7 Rebirth. Some of these games again really deserve more than I've written about them here (Particularly Y0), so maybe I'll come back and edit more thoughts in here at some point.


Yakuza 0 (2015) – A really wonderful RPG. I’ve been meaning to get into this franchise for years, especially after Jimbo played this and man it’s just a lot of fun. The 80’s urban setting is really fun and atmospheric with all those neon lights and such, and Kiryu and Majima are just great characters. I really liked how their stories initially seemed very independent but gradually intertwined together. Both of the their stories are just really strong gangster movie stuff. Likewise the seriousness of the main story contrasted with how absolutely goofy the sidequests were was really something else.

I remember Jimbo saying the combat could be a bit simple (IIRC) and not all of the upgrades seemed worth it and I do think there’s a bit of an issue there, though I think that’s true of a lot of action RPGs like this. I otherwise found the base combat pretty fun, though I generally liked Majima's fighting styles better than Kiryu's.

Last thing I’ll mention is that I didn’t go as hard on side content as I would have liked because of time limit I was on and well there’s like a million of these games now, but I might go back really get into buying up property, running the cabaret etc. one of these days.


Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad (2006) – A largely mindless action game about hot babes killing zombies. I’ve actually owned this for a while now, but I wanted to start finishing up the chunk of Xbox 360 games I have left (As well buying the last bunch of them that I wanted before things got TOO ridiculously expensive).

I do think the combat is okay at its core even if a later game in the series like Z2 Chaos is a lot better. On most stages you have two characters, while you alternate between them. The two main ones are Aya and Saki who both use swords (Aya having two different styles where she uses one sword or two) while Anna uses a variety of guns. Probably the big gimmick here is that you can’t just keep wailing on enemies forever- as Aya or Saki you need to constantly be cleaning blood off your swords, otherwise they can get stuck in enemies as you’re trying to mow them down (Meanwhile Anna needs to simply reload guns when low on ammo). It creates nice mix of going on offensive and also having to step back and take a breather before beginning your assault again.

I do have to say more generally btw that the Xbox 360 as a console shows its age waaaay more than I expected going in. Some of this might just be a flaw in my system but it runs awfully sluggishly compared to more modern consoles, with load times in particular being pretty slow. Even just menuing about on the dashboard doesn’t exactly feel snappy. Also that the games are only on DVD’s feels very anachronistic these days despite the 360 having an HDMI port. I do plan on trying more 360 games this year, so I’m sure I’ll find more to say about this console.


Kanon (1999) – Pretty meh visual novel overall if I’m being honest, at least reading it in 2024. The basic gist is that protagonist Yuichi returns to his childhood hometown that he has lost most of his memories of. As he re-acclimates to the town he connects with a variety of different girls, most of whom he realizes he has some pre-existing connection with, and most of whom have some kind of tragic past.

This didn’t really land for me. I liked most of the girls themselves, but all five of the major routes of this game just kinda drag on and on. I do think this game deserves some major credit for being major entry in “nakige” genre (Which I guess are supposed to be melodrama games about making you cry more than anything else), and if nothing else a lot of the presentation of game elements feels modern here compared to other titles like Snatcher or whatever (Note I am not talking about the art style here). I think the problem though is that any time you end up on a girl’s route, there’s kinda boring formula of slice of life, slice of life, slice of life, slice of life, slice of life, SOME SAD REVEAL OF GIRL’S PAST, RUMINATING A BIT ON REVEAL, SLICE OF LIFE, climax. There’s little in way of actual drama which gets a bit tedious and tends to be flaw in some of these VNs.

Still even with that in mind, some of these routes drag more than others. Mai’s in particular is just really tedious to get through (Despite probably being influence on Fate route in FSN), and honestly the reveal about the nature of the “demons” she’s fighting is a bit much. Really the reveal of supernatural elements in some of these routes is honestly weird. Like the one route where Yuichi has to explain that one of the girls is some kind of fox spirit to his family and everyone just accepts this is a bit lol.

I didn’t hate the game overall but it just really wasn’t one of my favorites.


^Poor Ayu is never beating the idiocy allegations.


Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade (2003) – Replayed this on a whim since it’s on NSO now. It’s still nicely strategic without being super overbearing about managing units or abilities or whatever the way some other SRPG’s can be. That makes it very easy to pick up and play without being too mindless. The first time I played this I remember a lot of my units died, whereas on my replay I had way less fatal errors of strategy. That shows I’m making progress in learning how to play these games well, if nothing else.

If I had one complaint is that extra modes like the Hard Modes or Hector Mode have to be unlocked by clearing Eliwood Mode once, which is just a bummer. I really wish there was at least a cheat code or something you could enter to just unlock those up front (A problem this games shares with the OG Resident Evil 4, come to think of it, where you don’t have Professional Mode upfront). I had actually intended to play Hector Mode here, but well I could just skip to it on NSO and I've long side lost the rom and related saves I had downloaded for this way back in the day. One I day I'll get to Hector Mode...


Fate/Samurai Remnant - Additional Episode 1 "Record's Fragment: Keian Command Championship" (2024) – The first DLC for FSR. Its basically just tournament of sorts where you pick a Master/Servant pair from the main game, fight some guys, and then by the end of it you’ve unlocked two new Servants for the main game and two extra moves for Iori. Fun enough for what it is, but pretty repetitive.

[Raxivace]

I've been really enjoying FF7 Rebirth lately, but I haven't played much the last few days since I've been rewatching NGE so I can see EOE in theaters in a few days. Meanwhile I did beat another game I've been playing on the side.


Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright (2015) - The sister game to Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest, which I played and reviewed here years and years ago. I wasn't the hugest fan of Conquest, but there's just enough about it that I liked to make me want to play the rest of the FE Fates games at some point.

While Conquest was fairly hard game with lot of weird objectives and map gimmicks, Birthright is much easier game with mostly straightforward "Rout all the enemies" maps. In addition, Birthright allows you to grind non-story maps to level up your characters which Conquest didn't let you do (Unless you bought certain DLC map). So the game design philosophies are honesty pretty different between the two.

Birthright is also just really easy. I expected an easy game so I even played this on Hard Mode despite it being my first run of the game, and honestly Birthright Hard is still much easier than Conquest Normal. On top of that, Conquest would often throw some really annoying ninja enemies at you a lot that could debuff your guys with their regular attacks, which Birthright never really did. Most enemies were only a little tanky or had some long range attacks, but that's nothing too bad.

Really there's only two kinda tricky chapters in this game- Chapter 5 which is part of the game's prologue anyways (And has typical hard mode RPG problem of only being hard because the game hasn't really opened up yet), and I found Chapter 23 somewhat tricky because Camilla can spam AOE attacks from across the map. Most of the rest of the game is pretty straightforward, nothing too bad until you get to Chapter 13. Once you get to Chapter 13, god kind Ryoma joins your squad and now the game is basically done as Ryoma can more or less solo the entire rest of the game on his own (Or at least paired up with a unit like Corrin). Not since Shinji Ikari with EVA-01 in Super Robot Wars V have I seen a unit THIS broken in an SPRG before, and honestly Ryoma is probably relatively better all things considered. Even Chapter 23 would have probably been much easier for me if I just forwent even launching my entire army and only sent out Ryoma and Corrin. Even for easy game this is pretty ridiculous- sure, you don't HAVE to use Ryoma but I shouldn't have to limit myself even playing on Hard Mode.

Birthright's story is also much simpler than Conquest's. While Conquest has Corrin siding with Nohr to somehow mitigate their invasion of Hoshido, Birthright has them siding with Hoshido in much more standard FE plot of fighting against invading kingdom of Nohr. There's really not much going on here storywise (Though I do have to say, having a unit auto-die in cutscene because I didn't get A Rank Support with Corrin for them was uh, interesting decision), but I do have to say it was somewhat affecting to occasionally have to fight and kill units I remembered from Conquest using the Birthright crew. Still even with that in mind, I think Conquest not only gives the Nohr characters better scenes, but probably the Hoshidans too. Like Takumi was probably MORE sympathetic character as your enemy trying to avenge his family than he is as your ally here.

This all makes me think Birthright was probably meant to be played before Conquest ultimately. Not just because the difficulty curve from jumping from one game to the other would be far more reasonable (I.e. learning basic Fates mechanics in Birthright and then really testing yourself on them in Conquest), but even story on paper I can buy starting from more classic FE premise of Birthright into far murkier one Conquest. Even something like Ryoma being overpowered god-king unit, all Nohrian scum should bow before his might becomes more sensible because hey once you play Conquest and actually have to fight OP Ryoma yourself, oh shit here he comes with his OP skills, that's frightening! But for whatever reason I decided to play Conquest first and struggled as a result and ultimately had lesser experience. I did still enjoy Birthright I guess in kinda mindless way, but its nowhere near one of my favorite Fire Emblem games.

Lastly there's also third FE Fates game, Revelation, which I'll play eventually. That has a pretty poor reputation online, but its supposed to be "golden route" of sorts where the game has both the Hoshidan and Nohr characters working together. At the very least, I'm curious to see how that plays out.

[Raxivace]

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (2024) - Yeah this game is excellent. It basically takes everything that was good in FF7 Remake and improves upon on it wholesale. The combat is given more depth not only with additional party members, generally expanded movesets for returning characters, but the game changing addition of Synergy Skills (Where two party members being able to do attacks together that not only doesn't cost ATB, but charges BOTH character's ATB!) and Synergy Abilities (Two party members basically being able to do a mini Limit Break together) as well. There's tons of exploration and challenges to find in semi-open world, characters, gasp, actually interact with each other and have a party dynamic. There's tons of minigames, including a card game called Queen's Blood 'that's second only to Triple Triad IMO. Story cutscenes are not needlessly dragged out with bland British voice acting etc. There's actual character customization and the setup you go into battle with actually matters! Female characters, gasp, actually do stuff and are involved with the narrative!

Pretty much everything I hated about FF16, FF7 Rebirth does the opposite. I don't know that I've ever seen two games so diametrically opposed in the same series release so close together before. It's honestly wild. I put about 40 hours into FF16 before finishing it and getting sick of the game long before that. I've put about 90 into Rebirth and still have plenty of more post-game stuff I want to do including a Hard Mode run. It's honestly a blast and pretty easily one of my new favorite FF games at this point.

Sure some of this is because I have preexisting love for this cast from the OG FF7, but I honestly do think this is much stronger model for the franchise going forward than bland "character action" approach of FF16.


Final Fantasy VII Remake (2020)
Final Fantasy VII Remake: Episode Intermission (2021) - Unfortunately a quest I was doing in FF7 Rebirth was bugged at one point (That has since been fixed in a patch), so I took the time to replay Remake and finished getting all the Trophies for the game and its DLC. I had never really taken the chance to play the PS5 version of the base game too, despite having played the DLC before which was PS5 exclusive at the time.

While Rebirth improves upon it, Remake is still pretty good even if I missed not yet having access to things like Synergy Abilities. I really enjoyed the Hard Mode run in particular, which cuts you off from being able to use Items at all and prevents Benches from restoring MP as well (Though they still restore HP thankfully). Since MP becomes more difficult to restore, this changes the game to mostly relying on Chakra and Prayer materias as a source of healing (Which don't use MP), and having to really rely on things like Elemental materia to negate uh, elemental damage and the like (Or to add elemental damage to weapon to just tear through enemies). It really wasn't as hard as I was fearing going in, but it was still fair challenge at times. It helped by using the chapter select feature, I did most of the Hard Mode run up to about Chapter 10-11ish to rack up more Ability Points for the party, then skipped to endgame to fight superbosses so I could get equipment called Götterdämmerung that not only starts you in battle with your Limit Break gauge at full, but charges the Limit gauge after you use a Limit as well. This really helped with going back to do the rest of the Hard Mode run, especially some of the harder fights like Rufus or Sephiroth.

The Yuffie DLC was similar on Hard Mode, though I wasn't able to get the Götterdämmerung until after I finished the run of the base game. Honestly I think her bonus bosses were harder for me generally. The Bahamut/Ifrit > Ramuh > Pride & Joy gauntlet in particular really gave me trouble for some reason. Everyone online said the Ramuh superboss was easier, but him in particular I really struggled against for some reason while I was able to get the much more lauded Bahamut/Ifrit fight down to a science more or less. I eventually got him, but idk what the problem was exactly.

If I have to nitpick something here, its that getting the Trophy for seeing all 9 dresses in the base game is really dumb. You end up having to replay Chapter 9 several times to do this, and its tied to the number of sidequests you've completed not only in Ch. 9 itself but Chs. 3 and 8 as well. I think the minimum number of runs you have to do is technically only 3, but that involves having a lot of foreknowledge I just don't think average player is going to have, since it involves doing minimum number of sidequests on some runs for specific dresses, and also playing Hard Mode Ch. 9 at least twice for the difference branches of side quests and getting the Manuscripts for additional Skill Points from each (Good luck fighting Hell House twice!). Its really silly bit of design, but most people aren't going to run into this and from what I can tell they learned their lesson for Rebirth which does not have anything this silly in its design.

Also man am I excited now to get around to my Hard Mode run of Rebirth at some point.

[Raxivace]

The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages (2001) - Got around to finishing this finally. Overall this is still a solid Zelda entry I think, though I don't think its quite as strong as Seasons. There wasn't any fatal flaws in the game or anything, but just a few too many annoying little things that added up to me. The first and I think biggest one was that some of the minigames were just a little too hard for mandatory story progression.


^The Goron rhythm minigame in particular I think is just a bit too much. I honestly struggled with it a bit, and the game makes you do it twice! Yes I know Seasons had a similar minigame too but I don't remember it giving me nearly as much trouble as Ages' equivalent.

A couple of bosses I think were just a bit too annoying too, like the Headthwomp from the second dungeon.


^I think its interesting to a Zelda boss from this kind of perspective post-Adventures of Link, though I thought the timing between the platforms and making sure the boss was on the right face was a just a bit much. Not like terribly hard boss or anything really, but just a bit annoying.

The last major thing, and I mentioned this was Seasons, is again the menuing being a bit annoying with the constant equipping/unequipping of items. The worst was when you get the Mermaid Suit and have to swim using it- I was so used to having my Sword equipped on B-Button, but while using that you can only use what you have equipped on A-Button. A bit annoying but again hardly fatal.

Ages still has some cool ideas though. The time travel theme may feel derivative after Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, but Ages still pxecutes the idea competently enough. The one dungeon you have to tackle between two different time periods is neat, even if its not as obvious that that's what you have to do as say OoT's Spirit Temple. I like the idea of there being a rival "hero" character to Link in Ralph, even if he's not super developed since this is still only a GBC game (He may be the most forgotten Zelda character in all honesty).

Finally tackling the Linked Game stuff after all these years is cool too. I have to say the Master Sword in this game just shreds enemies though- I didn't even see any of Veran's transformations past her "turtle" form, and even Ganon himself goes down SUPER quick to this thing.

I do have to say that constantly going back and forth between Seasons and Ages for bonus items was a bit cumbersome, especially when in Seasons they wanted you to do some obnoxious task like completely filling your Seed bag up or whatever. These days at least its fairly easy to just generate the correct code for your respective game if that's all you want, but again this is just GBC-era titles showing their age a bit.

One thing I noticed playing this is that Ages definitely seems more themed after OoT/MM in terms of the NPCs and such that show up (You even have a Lord Jabu-Jabu dungeon here!), while reading online, it seems Seasons was more themed after Zelda 1. To me that suggests intended order of games is probably Seasons > Ages, but if this game ever gets remake a la Link's Awakening, I'd like to try Ages > Seasons progression as contrast. I'd have to wonder if something like the Master Sword would be more or less helpful in Seasons' endgame.

Anyways I'm glad to have finally finished both of the Oracle titles after all these years. They may not be perfect but they're a nice little duology overall.