Category: Recommendations

Hi-Fi RUSH

  06/16/2023       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment

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.)

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   Action, Recommendations, Video Games     

Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner

  07/09/2023       St. Elmo's Fire      8 Comments

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!

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   Recommendations, RPGs, Shin Megami Tensei Series, Video Games      ,

Megaman Battle Network 1-3

  11/24/2023       St. Elmo's Fire      4 Comments

Megaman Battle Network is a spinoff of the Megaman series for the GBA and DS. I’ve never played any of the mainline Megaman games and am only vaguely familiar with them, but I played the third Battle Network game as a kid and greatly enjoyed it. Recently, a remastered port was released on Steam, so I decided to pick it up and give the whole series a whirl.

The premise is that this is an alternate universe where Megaman is a computer program instead of a robot, and the technology focus is similarly shifted: Everything is online, everything is a smart device, and everyone needs the help of sapient programs to navigate it all. This was wild science fiction when the first game was released in the early 2000s, yet in the present day it doesn’t sound too far off from our everyday lives. Surreal, and kind of eerie.

Gameplay-wise, MMBN made the interesting decision to switch from the platformer/shooter focus of the main games to an action RPG with deckbuilding elements. I like its gameplay a lot, and I find it demonstrates how adding even a small spatial component to RPGs greatly improves their complexity and engagement. (It does, however, retain the worst of grindy jRPG mechanics in spades.)

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   Action, Recommendations, RPGs, Video Games      , ,

Fire Emblem (Tellius Saga)

  08/23/2024       St. Elmo's Fire      3 Comments

After The Sacred Stones, Fire Emblem returned to home consoles and made the jump to 3D. At this point, after the mediocrity of the previous games, my expectations were at rock bottom, and I was even more pessimistic about this 3D entry, knowing that was so often where franchises went wrong.

So I was completely unprepared for how good these games would be.

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   Fire Emblem, Recommendations, RPGs, Strategy, Video Games     

Fire Emblem: Three Houses

  09/06/2024       St. Elmo's Fire      5 Comments

EDELGARD DID NOTHING WRONG

*ahem*

As I said at the beginning, this was actually my entry point into the series, as I saw tons of chatter about it on social media and wanted to see what the hype was all about. Now that I’ve played through the rest of the series, however, I’ve gained a greater appreciation for the ways in which it’s in conversation with its predecessors. But, yes, it’s still the best Fire Emblem (though Radiant Dawn has a better plot overall).

After the massively overambitious mess that was Fates, the Fire Emblem team decided to do that again, because they are categorically incapable of learning form their mistakes. Fortunately, they started by making their first good decision in a long time: They outsourced the plot to another company, Koei Tecmo (the Monster Rancher guys). Because they are competent writers who don’t have lolicon and incest fetishes, the game ended up with a really good story. In particular, it is an astoundingly insightful look at classism (though its takes on racism are… awkward at best).

Unfortunately, even with outsourcing, it’s clear the devs bit off more than they could chew; major parts of the game are blatantly unfinished, and the list of cut content is a mile long. Fortunately, the game was so successful the devs were allowed a second shot with an AU remake, Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, which implements many of the cut ideas and is overall a much better story. Unfortunately, they changed the gameplay to hack-and-slash, so I only watched it instead of playing it. But I’ll discuss both, because Three Hopes sheds more light on aspects of Three Houses.

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   Fire Emblem, Recommendations, RPGs, Strategy, Video Games     

The Knight Witch, and Climate Change Allegories

  09/23/2024       St. Elmo's Fire      1 Comment

The Knight Witch is a shoot-’em-up Metroidvania, which is a pairing I haven’t seen since Hero Core in 2010. I’m usually not great at shmups, but I managed to fumble my way to the end and it was pretty enjoyable.

The most unique mechanic is a deckbuilding element, where you can equip a large number of spell abilities but only three are available at a time, chosen at random. I thought this was an okay idea that encouraged you to use spells often to cycle through your cards, but it was pretty awkward to be constantly flicking my eyes over to the corner of the screen to check my available spells while also needing to keep track of all the bullets and enemies flooding the screen. I think the biggest problem was that each of the three cards in your “hand” are assigned to a different button, preventing you from building up muscle memory since the function of each button changes constantly. You need to look at the cards to even know what your buttons do, during gameplay that requires you to make split-second decisions about which buttons to press. That’s kind of an intractable problem with the random card draws, though; I can’t think of a good solution other than limiting you to one available card at a time.

What I really want to talk about is the story, though. It’s an environmentalist climate change narrative. It does a surprisingly good job of this up until the end, where you (of course) solve climate change by punching it in the face. I think this merits some discussion.

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   Action, Metroidvania, Recommendations, Video Games     

Mario & Luigi: Brothership

  12/15/2024       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment


Nine years after the last entry, Nintendo surprised everyone by reviving the Mario & Luigi series. It’s by a new studio and on the vile Switch, so I had high hopes and low expectations.

Unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it came back wrong. The body is here, but not the soul. The new studio is technically competent, but they don’t have the charm or artistry that Alphadream had, which is pretty dire for the series’ future because that was its main appeal.

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   Mario & Luigi Series, Recommendations, RPGs, Video Games      ,

Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights

  01/04/2025       St. Elmo's Fire      2 Comments

Ender Lilies is a Metroidvania about a little girl lost in your typical Soulslike post-apocalyptic hellscape with the ability to purify the corrupted undead and summon their spirits to fight on her behalf. I was extremely leery about this premise for obvious reasons, not helped by the promotional art that emphasizes how pathetic and moe the girl is. (Notice that she is pigeon-toed in the above picture; that is her default standing pose.) Fortunately, the game never got creepy about it, but the aesthetic does still annoy me. The game itself is very good and I recommend it if you like Soulslike Metroidvanias.

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   Metroidvania, Recommendations, Video Games