finally getting around to playing this for my first time! been enjoying it well enough for the first ~20 hours—i'm using the character portrait pack made by ryouko kui (dungeon meshi mangaka) and enjoying the vibe that brings, and the narrative involving strange dreams around the conflicted nature of the player character has me curious... it's not the most compelling thing to play, with so much more emphasis on the awkward pause and click combat than planescape: torment's much heavier storytelling style.
what has me really hesitating to continue at the moment is my first encounter with viconia, which comes out of nowhere to reveal the problematic nature of the d&d alignment system. when 'good' is violent racism and 'evil' is a character struggling to survive this hateful world, i become conflicted. having spoiled things for myself in my curiosity, because this game encourages me to overthink every aspect of it, i'm aware that my current party is the 'canon' one (as far as bg1 goes with respect to bg2's treatment of it) as well as the fact that viconia very much goes against my current playstyle of chaotic good and high reputation. she seems kind and friendly at first, and then the moment after recruiting her she starts calling you "surface scum." ok, so i need to earn her trust, perhaps. my anxiety stems from this game's handling of roleplaying mechanics i know are going to lead to her abandoning my party unless i start doing things like murdering the cops of the land to drop my rep, which... ok, lol, i can do that. it may also make more sense to just continue with the party i already have and then go with viconia in bg2 (when other characters will be... uh, dead), especially since there hasn't been a ton of dialogue or interaction between characters in bg1 so far anyway. it frustrates me a little bit that the first character to really interest me is so at odds with my playstyle and that i would have to arbitrarily ditch other characters (whom i currently find pretty useful) to even recruit her! but the idea of deciding to form a bond with a wicked and persecuted character who may have unforeseen depth in this stupid, rigid world of 'alignment' really excites me!
uh, anyway. might post another thing whenever i eventually finish this game. :B
what has me really hesitating to continue at the moment is my first encounter with viconia, which comes out of nowhere to reveal the problematic nature of the d&d alignment system. when 'good' is violent racism and 'evil' is a character struggling to survive this hateful world, i become conflicted. having spoiled things for myself in my curiosity, because this game encourages me to overthink every aspect of it, i'm aware that my current party is the 'canon' one (as far as bg1 goes with respect to bg2's treatment of it) as well as the fact that viconia very much goes against my current playstyle of chaotic good and high reputation. she seems kind and friendly at first, and then the moment after recruiting her she starts calling you "surface scum." ok, so i need to earn her trust, perhaps. my anxiety stems from this game's handling of roleplaying mechanics i know are going to lead to her abandoning my party unless i start doing things like murdering the cops of the land to drop my rep, which... ok, lol, i can do that. it may also make more sense to just continue with the party i already have and then go with viconia in bg2 (when other characters will be... uh, dead), especially since there hasn't been a ton of dialogue or interaction between characters in bg1 so far anyway. it frustrates me a little bit that the first character to really interest me is so at odds with my playstyle and that i would have to arbitrarily ditch other characters (whom i currently find pretty useful) to even recruit her! but the idea of deciding to form a bond with a wicked and persecuted character who may have unforeseen depth in this stupid, rigid world of 'alignment' really excites me!
uh, anyway. might post another thing whenever i eventually finish this game. :B
2020
go figure a long-time-coming source engine fps (standalone mod) would land in 2020 and dazzle my senses more than any other fps i've played in... years? i mean, i don't often play games that feel so artistically striking, lately, but this thing generously provides handpainted-looking mini locations both lush and bleak all flowing together with sound that is ALIVE. i have plenty more to play and little else to say, but i am already convinced. i'm completely bewildered by its approach to 'plot'—yet in awe, frequently mashing the screenshot key—and it's like how i felt when i first read BLAME! which... i mean, only makes sense, when one considers how even half-life 2 sometimes managed to evoke that "lost in the megastructure" vibe. and that game's dna is absolutely felt here. yet it feels fresh, and much of that freshness comes from the way finding your path forward often works, integrated into the world design in such a way that it feels natural, almost like a secret. it likely owes nearly as much to dark forces 2 as it does to its own source engine origins. not that anybody's coming to collect. this is just... peak fps, revisited and repurposed for brilliant artistic ends.
2020 was a big "cyberpunk" year for obvious reasons, but this is not a game that should be left overshadowed. if you like the genre (either: cyberpunk or fps), don't sleep on g string. it's like an ode to many of the best with its own inscrutably, vibrantly cyberpunk identity.
2020 was a big "cyberpunk" year for obvious reasons, but this is not a game that should be left overshadowed. if you like the genre (either: cyberpunk or fps), don't sleep on g string. it's like an ode to many of the best with its own inscrutably, vibrantly cyberpunk identity.
finally took a genuine shot at playing a game i used to own on cartridge (and never found very exciting) via emulation. over time i've come to really appreciate this game's whole aesthetic and status as the "in space, but super medieval fantasy" black sheep of the series. i like the unique look of its character portraits and sprites and whatnot. i like its music and its vibe.
i just (still) don't like playing it.
i just (still) don't like playing it.
ys 7 is where ys starts going downhill, but it only continues here (even if 8 is a bit better (while still not a game that really feels like ys to me)). just play dawn of ys, rather than this pale reflection of a truly excellent game. never mind that dawn of ys wasn't even made by falcom—this thing is as much of an insult to their own legacy as the other OTHER ys 4, mask of the sun. i hope they just let it rest, now: dawn of ys is the good one.
1991
just a psa: igdb regards this as the entry for the north american snes version of FFIV, not the famicom original FFII.
1993
i have always had a maybe silly amount of nostalgia for this game despite having barely played it in my teens, largely due to the love shown for it in the game magazines i read religiously back then (egm, gamefan, etc). i had my snes and zelda 3, but i was still young and couldn't afford much—shining force 2 was one of the foremost among the many games i coveted.
anyhow, suffice to say this game deserves to be remembered and rediscovered. if you've never played it before (perhaps if you've liked any fire emblem), give it a shot.
anyhow, suffice to say this game deserves to be remembered and rediscovered. if you've never played it before (perhaps if you've liked any fire emblem), give it a shot.
1994
this seems like it could be pretty cool during the first on-rails shooting stage, if a bit unpolished. the graphics are ultra slick. when you get to the second stage where you move around like a tank, though, it all goes down the tubes. would've been a bummer to pick this one up retail based on how it looked back in the day, only to find it's a bad game.
well, whatever you think of the game, one thing is undeniable:
the ost FUCKS
the ost FUCKS
the weakest of the expansions was still great and bolstered significantly by the ivalice and omega raids.
2016
the worst final fantasy. so much potential squandered, resulting in one of the biggest unfinished games ever made, full of emptiness and blandness. after this, if it hadn't been for final fantasy XIV (and later dragon quest XI), i might've decided square enix were all but dead to me. just a complete bummer of a game. i'm aware that it's been improved from this initial release, and i even picked up the windows edition on sale at some point, but as of yet i just can't bring myself to give this crap a second chance. i just don't think there's anything a more complete version can do to fix the failures of the game's world design. or its combat. or a story which only exists in pieces roughly stitched together. probably the least interesting story told in a final fantasy, at that. it's a failure parallel to the initial release of XIV, if not even worse.
2012
looks completely charming and i think it'd be more fun with twin sticks, but with the controls as they are this is far from comfortable to play.
2020
completely enjoyable, but it sacrifices the strangeness and challenge of the original games to further polish the style of the new stuff. missions are often so short (there are many you can clear in roughly one minute) that i feel like it would really lend itself to being a game on a mobile platform, while as pc game it has stripped away too much of the tension and discovery i want from a game like this.
1992
dank. borderline kusoge in some regards, but it's a weird enough blend of valis, el viento, maybe a little shinobi and/or castlevania, and king of demons to be interesting/cool, full of alien/demonic dream freaks to slash or blast. i mean, its odd anime-cronenberg plot was written by kenichi nishi, known for moon: remix rpg adventure and LOL: lack of love) so... that may speak to this game's underlying quality! the soundtrack, unfortunately, feels like a sort of lazy effort from michiko naruke, who would leave telenet in around 4 years to work on wild arms (which has a fantastic ost). at least it feels 'off' enough that it sometimes manages to enhance the game's overall strange vibe.
yep. (arguably) the best final fantasy. of course, i felt this way about heavensward, too. if you have any contempt for mmorpgs or subscription-based games, but you love an above and beyond exceptional, emotional jrpg tale, it would be well worth it to overcome those issues and dive in. you can play all the way up to level 60 (which includes heavensward) entirely for free, anyhow. i've never known anyone to not completely fall in love with this game once they give it a chance, and shadowbringers is one of the best things square enix have ever made at its absolute peak.
though i have just now played the game in its entirety for myself, i have some history with it going back into the mid '90s. see, i actually owned a copy of it and had played just a bit of it before a friend of mine offered to buy it from me. he had a new sega cd, and i was far more stoked on squaresoft games; i wanted to buy a copy of chrono trigger (which was retailing for EIGHTY BUCKS!) and, well, lunar got me there. that's pretty much the long and short of it.
still, though the game was no longer mine i did see bits of it over at my friend's house. its music felt familiar and nostalgic even as i began to play it last month. now, in 2020, this version of the game carries with it the charming mystique of those early '90s cd-rom games from japan which largely eluded me as a teenager (i mean, until the ps1 and saturn... but i'm talking about the sega cd and the turbo cd, among others). in short, my enjoyment of this game leans heavily on this vibe.
it's just not a particularly great jrpg. it's not bad! it's good enough that i still look forward to seeing what improvements are made in eternal blue and the psx/saturn remakes. and frankly, the working designs localization does it no favors. i did not need to read dialogue about using barney video tapes as target practice in a fantasy rpg. also, there's a serious imbalance in the obnoxious encounter rate when i can't walk two steps without getting into a fight half the time, but every single boss fight is over in 3 or 4 turns. this is absolutely one of those jrpgs where the endless battling becomes tedious, especially since you're just attacking (or choosing 'ai', which is... also just attacking) most of the time.
aside from wanting certain quality of life improvements to menus and understanding what spells do, i hope the future games are much more colorful. this one made overwhelming use of brown and often felt very drab—not the best use of the system's color palette, at least outside of the really nice anime-style pixel art cinematics.
one last note: the music is great! i just love this style of early disc-based, prog rock inspired jrpg music. from what i've heard, it's actually much more pleasing to my tastes than the music in the remakes. we'll see, though.
still, though the game was no longer mine i did see bits of it over at my friend's house. its music felt familiar and nostalgic even as i began to play it last month. now, in 2020, this version of the game carries with it the charming mystique of those early '90s cd-rom games from japan which largely eluded me as a teenager (i mean, until the ps1 and saturn... but i'm talking about the sega cd and the turbo cd, among others). in short, my enjoyment of this game leans heavily on this vibe.
it's just not a particularly great jrpg. it's not bad! it's good enough that i still look forward to seeing what improvements are made in eternal blue and the psx/saturn remakes. and frankly, the working designs localization does it no favors. i did not need to read dialogue about using barney video tapes as target practice in a fantasy rpg. also, there's a serious imbalance in the obnoxious encounter rate when i can't walk two steps without getting into a fight half the time, but every single boss fight is over in 3 or 4 turns. this is absolutely one of those jrpgs where the endless battling becomes tedious, especially since you're just attacking (or choosing 'ai', which is... also just attacking) most of the time.
aside from wanting certain quality of life improvements to menus and understanding what spells do, i hope the future games are much more colorful. this one made overwhelming use of brown and often felt very drab—not the best use of the system's color palette, at least outside of the really nice anime-style pixel art cinematics.
one last note: the music is great! i just love this style of early disc-based, prog rock inspired jrpg music. from what i've heard, it's actually much more pleasing to my tastes than the music in the remakes. we'll see, though.