Ah, colon cancer.
Anyway, I found an SMT spinoff I didn’t hate! Remember how disappointed I was that, despite SMT3 making a big deal of the protagonist being part demon, he was still basically just a dude? Well, this game fixes that.
This lovely creature is the main character. Notice how he is an actual inhuman monster and not just a dude with tattoos!
Rounding up some spinoffs that sounded interesting. I bounced on all of them almost immediately because they are terrible.
Hi-Fi RUSH is a hybrid of action and rhythm games. I think this is an excellent combination, as most action games are all about timing and rhythm already, so this is honestly a pretty obvious step to take. It’s also remarkably good at accessibility: It has multiple colorblindness filters and subtitle options, and the entire game environment moves with the beat, so you can time yourself visually even if you have a bad sense of rhythm. I enjoyed it a lot, even though the battles did get a bit too frenetic for me to follow at times. In particular, I think its best feature was sharply segregating combat and platforming sections; each combat encounter is a major one-time setpiece instead of you running into enemies all the time. jRPGs, take note.
I don’t want to talk about the gameplay, though. The story and writing are actually much more noteworthy. I believe it to be a very instructive example of Rebellion Chic: Despite being a cyberpunk story about a ragtag resistance fighting an evil corporation, its core messages are actually very conservative and pro-capitalist.
(Spoilers for the ending, but I don’t think they’re particularly ruinous.)
This should have been DLC.
Darkest Dungeon 2 is, obviously, the followup to Darkest Dungeon, which I previously reviewed. The developers deliberately wanted to take the sequel in a different direction instead of just making Darkest Dungeon again, which I support. Unfortunately, that direction was completely at odds with it being a roguelike.
This is the first SMT game I’ve reviewed that was made after Devil Survivor, so we’ve finally caught up to my first exposure to the series! Let’s see if the series improves or if DeSu proved to be the high point after all, shall we?
This game was originally planned to be SMT4, but was rebranded as a spinoff due to how different it ended up compared to the mainline games. Instead of an ordinary high school student, you play as an elite soldier tasked with investigating a portal to Hell that’s appeared in Antarctica and threatens to swallow the entire planet.
Inside: Vision Soft Rest, What Remains of Edith Finch, Dungeons of Dreadrock
Here’s the roundup for the remaining Christmas games that didn’t warrant full posts.
Inside: Snake Pass, Environmental Station Alpha, Slime Rancher, Q.U.B.E. 2, Event[0]
I despaired of ever getting to play this because it was a PS4 exclusive, but this year it got ported to Switch!
Digimon World: Next Order is the third true Digimon World game, conceived as a throwback to the original PSX game and a followup to Re:Digitize, which I reviewed here. It is a much better game than either of them and does a better job of recapturing the essence of the original Digimon World, but still falls woefully short. Admittedly, at least part of this is definitely that the original Digimon World‘s formula wasn’t very good to begin with, but a big part is definitely the design decisions of this game, particularly a lot of things that are most definitely problems with the current generation of gaming.
This is sort of like a bite-sized 2D version of Shadow of the Colossus. (Despite what the name may lead you to think, it doesn’t actually have much similarity to Dark Souls.) You play as a tiny human fighting massive monsters, with some environmental storytelling hinting at surrounding context.
Here’s the most notable about this game: You only have one hit, but so do the bosses. One hit to their weak point and that’s it, you’re done. This has blown my mind in regards to how I think about game design and game challenges, and I’m going to vomit those thoughts at you now.
Abomi Nation is a roguelike mons RPG — essentially, an entire game built around a randomizer Nuzlocke. I think this is a pretty smart pairing — the biggest problem in mons games is that it’s infeasible for a single player to use more than a small fraction of the total roster, so by building the game around multiple playthroughs and randomizing your team each run, you get to appreciate a wider variety of mons than you would otherwise.
The Nuzlocke comparison is very apt, however, because the gameplay is otherwise nearly identical to Pokemon’s, with all of its flaws along for the ride.
The years preceding Localization Crimes III: Nocturne saw a large number of spinoff releases for the series. One of them was Persona, which Act reviewed way before this, but a lesser-known one was Devil Summoner, which is basically identical to the main series so I’m not entirely sure why it’s a spinoff.
The first Devil Summoner sounds interesting from the Wikipedia article, but it was never even fan-translated, so I instead started at Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers. Ah, you know something’s a franchise when it contracts colon cancer!
Disc Creatures is a fantastic mons RPG that effectively captures the feeling of old-school Pokemon while bringing plenty of new things to the table. It is also, unfortunately, a very standard jRPG that got boring for me extremely fast, but if that doesn’t bother you there’s a lot here to love.
The site was down for the past couple days due to some hosting issues, but it’s been resolved now. Welcome back!
This isn’t a review post, but what’s the point of having a blog if you don’t go mad with power at some point. I just released the open beta for a fangame I have made: Reinvention of the Goddess, a rewrite of the prologue of Shin Megami Tensei III. If that interests you, please play it and leave your thoughts.