Most of these weren’t bad so much as “This should have been a novel or indie film.”
Inside: Pinstripe, TIMEFrame, Mages of Mystralia.
Author Archives: St. Elmo's Fire
Christmas Steam Games 2020: QuickRecs
It’s that time several months past that time of the year again!
Inside: Ittle Dew, Mini Ghost, Papers Please, Pyre, Out There Somewhere, Toki Tori 2, Antichamber.
Super Mario Odyssey
Another big Nintendo game I’m getting to fashionably late. I’m very much of two minds about this one.
Aesthetically, the game is an absolute delight. The premise of making the different worlds feel genuinely alien in a way that even the planets of Galaxy didn’t by giving them all radically different aesthetics and art styles was wonderful, and a fantastic way to make even this old franchise feel fresh. I loved all the kingdoms and all the inhabitants, especially the steam gardeners — despite being robots they actually seemed like the most emotional of all the characters, and the duality of their earnest joy at their work and snarky pettiness was so adorable. (I particularly love the one that is very obviously the robot equivalent of drunk hollering that the Steam Gardens are objectively the best kingdom.) I loved the possession mechanic. I loved the 8-bit segments and the callbacks to earlier games, especially the New Donk City festival, which felt like a reflection on how far the franchise has come. I loved that we got to explore Bowser’s kingdom and that it was a completely different flavor of medieval palace than the Mushroom Kingdom. I loved getting to fight a giant frickin’ dragon that looks like it wandered in from Dark Souls. I loved that we got to revisit Peach’s castle as it was in Super Mario 64. I loved that the designers put in the detail that Bowser didn’t just dress up for the occasion, he also delicately coiffed his hair. I loved following up the final boss fight with getting to possess Bowser for a super awesome Metroid-esque escape sequence. I loved all the outfits, and I took a particular delight in dancing around Bowser’s kingdom in a clown suit.
But I feel they really dropped the ball on actually putting a compelling game on top of this phenomenal backdrop. It was clearly trying to experiment with the same open-world approach as Breath of the Wild, but that doesn’t work nearly as well for a platformer than it does for an action adventure. The actual platforming challenges feel tiny, empty, and unsatisfying, and the game as a whole feels like it’s pulling in too many directions.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Finally got around to this, 4 years late. It’s good!
I think my most important takeaway from this game is that it’s very different from other Zelda games. It’s good at what it is, but it scratches a different itch. I wouldn’t want all Zelda games to be like this one going forward.
Trash Planet
Trash Planet is a game by the creator of HELLBOUND. It’s a very different game, taking a hard shift into post-apocalyptic science fiction and more difficult, resource-management gameplay. Much like HELLBOUND, I enjoyed a lot of it, but the gameplay was very janky and ran into a lot of standard RPG design pitfalls.
Games for Racial Justice and Equality (Part 3)
N through P. I got distracted splitting my time with my Christmas games, so this is shorter than the previous posts. Some interesting RPGs in this one.
HEARTBEAT
I heard a lot of people praising this game as a unique twist on the jRPG formula with a lot of UnderTale inspiration and great female characters. Then I heard that the developers were TERFs, which just made me even more curious while also killing my desire to give these people any money. So I pirated it.
The game is. Bad. So, so bad. Trying to understand it sends me into a brain-killing fever. But let’s try.
Digimon World Re:Digitize Decode
So, a while back I reviewed Digimon World Re:Digitize. The fan translation for the 3DS port, “Decode”, was recently finished. I decided to give it a whirl at the behest of the Digimon community’s insistence that its new features fixed all my complaints about Re:Digitize.
In general, I found it an improvement — it follows up on a lot of dropped plot threads from the original, adds lots more NPC dialogue with genuinely helpful tips, and adds several new side quests that provide useful features. But it still doesn’t fix any of the fundamental problems I had with the original.
Darkest Dungeon
Yes, I finally got around to this one! I’m… rather ambivalent towards it.
Darkest Dungeon is a party-based RPG roguelike where you compile a party of 4 from 17 different classes and send them on expeditions into Lovecraftian nightmare dungeons. The key mechanic is that mental health is just as important as physical: Events like low light, critical hits, and certain enemy attacks will degrade your characters’ sanity, and when it gets to be too much they will go insane, followed by dying of a heart attack if pushed even farther. (Permadeath is, of course, a feature.) Insane characters create a death spiral where they will stress out the rest of the party with every action, as well as randomly disobeying orders or skipping turns. It’s very easy for even a well-balanced party to be completely destroyed if too many characters start going insane.
I found it to be an interesting idea, but the actual gameplay I found very grindy and frustrating, and I’m left feeling that the designers did not succeed in conveying their intended message at all.
Games for Racial Justice and Equality (Part 2)
Continuing where we left off. A much weaker showing this time, with a lot of games I couldn’t even finish.
Pokeauthors Special Weirdo Spotlight
Someone made a throwaway to troll me and for some reason couldn’t stop responding.
Yo-Kai Watch
I recently tried out the first Yo-Kai Watch game, out of curiosity for what the rest of the mons scene is doing.
My most important takeaway is that anyone who says Yo-Kai Watch is trying to copy or replace Pokemon has clearly not only never played the game but never played any other mons game either and probably thinks Pokemon has a copyright on the genre. The two franchises share a target audience, but otherwise they could not be more different. Yokai talk and are presented as distinct characters, yokai cannot be commanded, and most shockingly of all, the protagonist isn’t silent!
As for the game itself, it is a godawful grindy mess that can barely be called a game. But it has some interesting ideas, and I enjoyed the creature designs.
Games For Racial Justice and Equality (Part 1)
So, itch.io ran a bundle to fundraise for Black Lives Matter, offering over a thousand games for only $5. As a fundraiser, I found the ethos… questionable (“Give us money so we can do actual activism while you play video games”), but it was a good deal, so I got it.
A good chunk of the items included aren’t actual games; they are either assets or tabletop RPGs. There are still a ton, though. Here are my thoughts on the games I’ve gotten through in the first half of the year:
The Other Pokeauthors, Part 160
A revenge review from someone I reviewed 4 years ago for some reason, and one extremely chill response.
[14] The Other Pokereviews, Part 160
A mixed bag today.
By the way, The Zoroark Games have concluded! I did not participate, but Farla did, and there are many other good stories there too.
Anime: 3