Game Finished In 2024 #16:

I miss Flash, man. The Wild West of the internet was defined in a huge chunk by this one programming language. Back before there were three websites, Flash allowed for creatives in games and animation to make things and share them easily in a way that isn't really the same today. Perhaps the tools for those creatives, like Godot, are better now, but something got lost after Adobe killed Flash in 2020, for stupid dumb idiot corporate reasons. I still have Flash installed. I get a notification every couple weeks asking me to uninstall it and every time I tell the notification to go fuck itself. But anyway.

The raw creative potential of Flash led to a veritable boom in independent art on sites like Newgrounds. As we've seen with success stories like Smiling Friends, the talent on these sites was very real, and converted to the mainstream seamlessly. While it wasn't all GOOD, with some pretty tasteless edginess at times, art born from the Flash boom has a certain unfiltered energy to it. These are the things the creator wanted to make, uncompromised. The Epic Battle Fantasy series is one of my favorite examples of this. The first three games were things I appreciated a lot even when I was younger, and I felt the need while tackling some shorter games to give this one the full playthrough it deserved.

The Epic Battle Fantasy series is characterized by a couple of things. The distinctive art style with excellent hand drawn animations, the tonal focus on comedy and references, the horniness, and the simple but effective RPG battles. These combine to create a package of pure Soul, if you will, with the full knowledge that everything in here is because of unbridled author appeal. Despite this, it somehow avoids the regular trappings of overindulgence. The series is fairly approachable for any RPG fan, and the independent spirit of it all makes the appeal evident.

EBF4 continues the overworld from 3, and expands the systems a fair bit, with the addition of a fourth party member, Anna. I didn't find the solution to juggling four party members as elegant as I would have hoped, with only three party slots meaning Matt usually caught the bench as i liked Lance and Natalie more, in both gameplay and character. Summons are now given their own meter which greatly expands your options. The core gameplay loop from 3, with battles, upgrades, and exploration remains much the same, with the addition of progression-based items allowing you to find new things when backtracking to previous areas. When the systems are this innately satisfying, it makes for a very fun experience.

It's not all perfect, as I did encounter a bit of fatigue with the battles. I felt like I was missing something and it made them drag significantly more than it seemed like they should. Combined with a longer runtime than 3, and I felt like I was dragging a fair bit near the end. This was compounded by me overestimating how much game I had left, which is on me, but once I realized I was in the second to last area, and turned on the assist mode option to make elemental weaknesses more pronounced, I got to the end pretty handily. The final boss is a bit of a stat wall, sadly, and I had to turn down the difficulty to get through it because I really didn't want to deal with adjusting my build to retry it. Skill issue, perhaps, but at that point I didn't really care.

I greatly anticipate getting to 5 at some point, and I greatly appreciate finally making the time to get around to this installment in a series I enjoy a lot. While the series holds nostalgic value to me, it's evident that the merits this series stood on were genuine.

Game Finished [Again] In 2024 #15:

In preparation for what's going to be a pretty big undertaking, I wanted to play some shorter games. Shadows Over Loathing, this game's sequel, is on my list for after that undertaking, so I wanted to replay the first game, which I remembered really liking when I played it years ago.

West of Loathing is a singleplayer spinoff to the browser based MMO Kingdom of Loathing, which I played a fair bit of when I was younger, despite my relative lack of understanding it. You don't need to have played it to understand this game in the slightest, and you could probably get away with not even knowing it exists, but it's fun background info. The Loathing series, as I suppose it counts as one now, is characterized by an extremely simplistic art style of monochromatic stick figures and a LOT of jokes.

Many games have tried to be comedic, but West of Loathing is intimately Committed To The Bit in every way imaginable. An NPC will mention things haven't been the same since The Cows Came Home, which is an event that deeply impacts the setting to the point demonic cows are one of your primary types of random encounter. As the jokes are so integral to the game, I regretfully must leave them as unspoiled as possible, but I will make one exception for my absolute favorite joke in any game, the spittoons. Spittoons are, of course, pans that people spit things such as tobacco in. However, in West of Loathing, they contain amazing gear. Every time you investigate one of these, the narration gets increasingly hostile towards you. It starts at telling you how gross it is to be sticking your hand into one, and why you REALLY shouldn't be doing it, and only escalates from there with somehow more disgusting spittoons and more powerful equipment. There's a very noticeable lean on the fourth wall, but the spittoons are one of the few times it gets broken entirely. To call this bit god tier is an understatement. While this is the best one, there are a LOT more jokes. In my roughly eight hours of playing the Joke Per Minute rate was utterly insane.

It helps as well that the game itself is really good at what it sets out to do. The gameplay is secondary to the writing and jokes for sure, but there is still very clear effort being put in. You choose one of three classes, western spins on the fighter/mage/thief dynamic, and explore the west, getting into turn based battles along the way. If you are RUSHING the main story, the basic quest can be done extremely quickly, but a lot of the joy comes in finding new places, which will give you new stuff and new jokes. The stat and skill system deserves special attention, too, as with the right stats and skills you can solve encounters in ways other than combat. This game lets you skip the final boss with the right item. There are also a lot of puzzle based encounters. The Gun Manor DLC is a great example of this, having you explore a manor full of ghosts that you can choose to either settle peacefully by solving their puzzle or violently. Some puzzles made me break out a guide, but there are very few truly bad puzzles.

I didn't have the words for it when I first played, but this game is a genuine CRPG, and a great one at that. The main game is short enough to allow you to replay it multiple times, and there are four different companions to facilitate this. It's a really excellent little package, and absolutely worth playing, as it seems to have become a bit of a hidden gem. I greatly look forward to Shadows over Loathing.