Crazy week at work so no gaming progress.
I’d like to resume Senren * Banka during the weekend but we’ll see how it goes. Want to get a couple games out of my way ASAP because Trails through Daybreak is coming soon and it’ll definitely eat all my free time.
Hyped to play AAI2, it’s one of the highest rated games on the franchise on VNDB, only below PW3 and GAA2 which were both fantastic.
There’s 4 of them on the Switch/PS4, and all of them have an Asian/English version.
I personally rank them in this order: V > T > X> 30, but I always recommend people trying these games to look into which anime/mecha series are included on each and get whichever has more series you like.
You can find this information (along with a lot more) on the Akurasu Wiki.
Replaying Super Robot Wars V!
The original plan for the week was to continue Senren * Banka, but I got this game on the mail during the week, decided to try it for a just a bit… and remembered how I’m hopelessly addicted to this series.
For those unfamiliar with the series, Super Robot Wars games are turn-based strategy RPGs where units from several mecha anime band together, so you can have the Evangelions teaming with Gundams and Daitarn 3 against common foes, with really cool attack animations and a crazy crossover plot mixing elements of all the series involved.
It’s a very old series, the first game was released in the 90’s for the original B&W Gameboy, but while there are over 50 games in the series almost none of them were released in the west due to the complex licensing involved. But luckily for the english-speaking audience since the PS4 they started released Asian “multi-language” versions of these games, so we can finally enjoy them properly.
I had already played this game on the PS4, but could not resist a recent sale and double-dipped so I now have the Switch version as well. Decided to use the female protagonist (Chitose) for this replay since I love her themes, and I’m currently around Stage 20.
Finished 1000xRESIST!
This game was really good and one of my best surprises in recent years.
As I mentioned last week, this is a “walking simulator” taking place in a world where human race almost went extinct due to a plague and a new society was created from clones of the last survivor, a girl called Iris. The game has you play as “Watcher”, one of the clone sisters who goes through Iris’s memories and learns about the past and the history of this world.
The writing in this game is excellent, in particular for the main characters. The sci-fi backdrop works well, and I found the connections to the real-world very interesting - the developers describe themselves as a “group of majority Asian-Canadian diaspora creators”, and without going into spoilers it’s very clear they drew from their personal experiences when setting the tone and themes for this game.
Now, the bad parts: While the visual design is interesting, performance and resolution are underwhelming on the Switch, plus I got a couple crashes during gameplay. Also, navigating the main “hub” is horrible and you will get lost often (developers, please add a map or better waypoint system!), but despite those problems I still highly recommend this one to people who enjoy strong narratives.
Edit: The newest patch adds a map of the main hub. Definitely a good improvement.
Playing Senren * Banka!
First time playing a VN from Yuzusoft, a developer famous for lighthearted games leaning more on the slice-of-life/romance genre.
Still very early in the game (Chapter 1-3), but so far this has been quite fun. MC goes visit family who lives in a small montain village, and while there decides to try pulling a legendary sword stuck in a boulder.
Except when he tries it… the sword breaks in half. 😄 But that apparently still counts as becoming the “master” of the legendary blade, so he ends up tangled in a mess involving an arranged married, a priestess cursed with cat ears (?!), the spirit of the sword, ninjas, and even some creepy monsters. Quite curious to see where the story goes from here.
The production values and polish are great. Great art and voice work, clean interface including an excellent flowchart showing the choices you took and potential branches.
Had to do a little searching because the trailer doesn’t really tell much about the game, looks like this is a Mystery Otome VN.
Got fairly good reviews on VNDB.
Playing Lunaria: Virtualized Moonchild!
Almost exactly an year ago I finished Planetarian, a classic visual novel that was also the first game from the “Kinectic Novel” series - a Visual Arts brand for VNs without any choices or branches in the storyline, more akin to a visual book than a game.
So I thought it was appropriate to celebrate this anniversary by playing Lunaria, another Kinetic Novel from the same studio (Key, of Clannad fame) that I had just received in the mail.
One of the things that drew me to both these games is that I’m a huge sci-fi fan, and both deal with interactions between AIs and humans. However, they take very different approaches to this theme - Planetarian is bittersweet story focused on the contrast between the post-apocalyptic present and the small glimpse of a better past the MC encounters, while Lunaria is a much brigher slice-of-life story with focus on VR and e-sports.
The plot so far is the typical “boy meets cute (AI) girl, romance starts to develop between them”, but this being a Key game I’m already expecting something tragic to happen in the latter parts of the story - there’s already some hints of a bigger plot around the AI girl’s origins and circumstances.
Getting “Untitled Goose Game” vibes from this one, and if that comparison is correct this is 100% a day 1 purchase for me.
According that what I’ve found so far it looks like coop is online-only. :/
Which probably turns this one into a “pass” for me, I’m finally getting more opportinities to play local coop again.
I also like that they’ve been releasing their games physically on Japan but they are multi-language, I just ordered Drainus on Play-Asia.
They are a bit pricy for the game’s short length, but I’m a physical game collector so I still prefer to get them that way.
Finished Ori and the Will of the Wisps!
Comments on the first game on this post from a couple weeks ago, and early impressions of the second game here.
Overall a big improvement on the first game and one I can more easily recommend to others.
However, I think the praise both games get is excessive. Don’t get me wrong, they’re good games with beautiful art, fantastic OST, really cool world and exploration. But IMO they also have some significant flaws including plenty of cheap deaths, frustrating platforming sequences with a lot a of trial-and-error, hard-to-see hitboxes, and subpar platforming controls on the first game.
Finished Record of Lodoss War-Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth-
Same developer as Touhou Luna Nights, and I’ve enjoyed it almost as much. This one is a lot easier and beginner-friendly (maybe even to its detriment), but the smooth controls and exploration make so, so fun to play.
These two games definitely made me a fan of Team Ladybug, they have another game called “Drainus” which is now high in my wishlist, and I’ll keep an eye for new releases from them.
Playing Ori and the Will of the Wisps!
I commented about the first game on my previous post, and while I did have a good time with it there were some pretty annoying flaws as well.
The second game fixes most of my complaints - platforming feels better, plus you get some of the relevant movement skills earlier which also helps improve the experience when exploring. Combat is pretty decent this time, and the game also includes plenty of customization with a lot of attack and passive skills for you to choose from.
I get that this comes at a cost of the game feeling a bit less “unique”, but I’m definitely having more fun with one.
Added Touhou Luna Nights to my wishlist, I am leaning towards shorter games these days, so 10 hours to 100% sounds really good to me.
It’s a fantastic game, my second favorite in this genre in recent years after Axiom Verge. Worth mentioning that it can be quite hard at times, in particular at bosses, but I feel it gives you more than enough tools to learn their patterns and beat them.
The protagonist’s time-manipulation power is really neat, you have the ability to slow or even stop time for short periods which is handy when you’re stuck on “OK, so how the hell do I dodge this attack”. There’s also a “grazing” mechanic that lets you recover HP by getting close to the enemy or their bullets, which you can use to recover mid-battle if there’s a particular attack pattern you can’t dodge perfectly.
Didn’t expect to hear bad things about Ori, I haven’t played it yet, but the universal acclaim it gets, I was expecting it to be near the perfect / masterpiece level.
I’m now playing the sequel and having a much better time, though it does lose some of the uniqueness of the first game in favor including more common elements seen in games of this genre.
How is it if you aren’t into poker? Since everyone describing it mention poker, I didn’t even look into it.
Balatro to me is a card/deckbuilding roguelike that just happens to use the poker rules because people are familiar with those and it helps shrink the learning curve.
The focus is not getting the best poker hand, but rather on finding a strategy that maximizes the chips you get with the tools you’re given each run. I just had a very successful run where I build a deck solely focused on getting “Two Pair” hands all the time.
Finished replaying 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim!
Goddamn, I love this game. If you like story-focused games I can’t recommend it enough.
Finished Touhou Luna Nights!
I know almost nothing about the Touhou universe, but even without knowing the characters I had a ton of fun with this game.
Combat is fantastic, and it’s challenging without being too frustrating. Exploration is a bit too linear, but overall I really appreciate seeing a recent metroidvania game that is not just following the formula set by Hollow Knight. The only bad I thing I can say is that the the game is really short, there’s no in-game timer but it definitely took me less than 10h to get 100% completion.
Finished Ori and the Blind Forest!
There’s a lot of good things and a lot of bad things going on on this one.
Production values are great, the world is very interesting, some stages are quite unique, and most puzzles are well designed. On the other hand, for a game with a lot of focus on platforming the controls don’t feel quite right - they’re kinda floaty and weird, it’s easy to miss platforms when jumping (or even more strange, when climbing them from the side), wall jump sometimes doesn’t grab and you’re not quite sure it didn’t work… Maybe I’ve been spoiled by games like Mario or Celeste, but I sometimes get an impression that I’m fighting against the controls in this one.
Combat is underwhelming, but that’s not really the focus on that game. Also, you’re going to die A LOT, and even with the mechanic that lets you save almost anywhere this can get annoying.
Playing Balatro!
So after hearing a billion people commenting about this game I picked it up, and I can confirm it’s as fun and addictive as advertised. Not that hard as far roguelikes go, I had my first win somewhere around 3h of playtime and managed a few more already.
Playing Crystar!
Early impressions on previous posts.
I’m bored with this game but I still want to finish it, so I’ll playing it slowly and sparsely. Not sure how long it’ll take, and probably won’t mention in future posts unless I hit some relevant landmark.
Much better.
Combat is faster paced and way more fun, dungeons are shorter (maybe even too short) and the enemies are more interesting, there aren’t really any “mobs”, they are all sort of mini-bosses that you need to be careful around as they hit really hard. It also hit a nice spot of being challenging without being too hard - I got a few game overs but it never got to the point where I was frustrated by the difficulty.
When I finished the main story for Crymachina I was thinking “I could still keep playing this for a while before I got bored of the gameplay” despite replaying several stages for extra gear/XP.
If someone ever makes a Crystar mod that cuts dungeons from 3 floors to 1 and keeps everything else the same that might be a game I’d recommend.
It’s also interesting that I think the developer did have an inkling that the dungeons were too big, there’s optional “grinding” stages that are exactly as I described with 1/3 of the size and they flow so, so much better.
I wanted to like the game, and I’m still planning on finishing it eventually but each dungeon is 30min of the exact same (average-at-best) combat gameplay, and I’m estimating there’s at least 40 of these required to finish the game.
I was already getting very tired of this last week and I believe I’m still only halfway through. :/
Playing Crystar!
Early impressions on the previous post.
Last week I thought I was 80% into the game, but I realized there’s a lot more story left than I expected, so this one will take a longer to finish, probably a week or two more at my current pace.
It was a really neat twist though.
You beat the final boss, get a somewhat sad ending with a lot of loose ends left and start thinking “there’s got to be a better ending, I wonder what are the requirements”.
…and then you get a messsage “There’s a new story available” and the game immediatelly loops back to the beginning. But there’s some very obvious differences from the start, like the reveal of the identity of the butterfly/soul that helps you during the prologue.
I guess the game is going into the direction of multiple timelines? And from the icons on the loading screen I think there will be 3 or 4 loops total.
At least these additional loops seem to be much shorter, it just skipped from the Prologue straight to Chapter 6 (of 8), but that still means I have a lot to go.
Replaying 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim!
Crystar’s gameplay is kinda repetitive so I need to take breaks from time to time, and I’ve been using this to continue this replay.
Did a lot of grinding in tower defense stages, I just love those, but progressed nicely on the story too. Currently around 80% both modes.
Been too tired due a couple rough weeks at work, so instead mixing drinks I’ve been just drinking whisky or brandy lately.
Another crazy week, this time both at work and personal life, but at least this time I managed to sneak some gaming progress.
Playing Senren * Banka!
Completed the first chapter, but I imagine I’m still quite early in the game since I haven’t even met the last of the main heroines.
Story continues to be fun slice-of-life mixed with some supernatural elements. Favorite character is definitely Mako, the mischievous ninja bodyguard.
Playing Sea of Stars!
I usually avoid playing two longer story-driven games at the same time, but needed something with a bit more gameplay to help me get through this week, so I decided to start this one as well.
Loving the pixel art and the Mario-RPG style battle system with timed attacks. Too early to comment on the story asides from the fact that the flashback near the beginning dragged at bit too much for my tastes.
As for characters, the “Warrior Cook” Garl is great but the two main protagonists still feel kinda bland, let’s hope we see more of them as the game progresses.