In which Luke becomes very slightly less terrible and everyone else treads water.
My brother told me to play this, possibly in revenge for all the weird games I’ve made him play.
You know that fanfic that newbie barely teenage boys have, the one with the new region and new pokemon but this time it’s got ALCOHOL and SEX REFERENCES and ZANY unlike those squares at Nintendo? It’s that. Like, beat by beat. If that’s you? Well, you’ll love this.
Fate/Extra is an RPG taking place in a world alternative to the canon Nasuverse where mana has disappeared from Earth somewhere in 70s. As a result, magecraft has died out and former magi families reinvented themselves as spiritual hackers, people capable of using their magic circuits to “digitize their souls” and enter virtual worlds wholly rather than interacting with them through an interface. It’s kinda unclear what they normally do with that ability aside from playing virtual LARP games as the game takes place in a very special setting that probably doesn’t have an analog on Earth.
Specifically, we find ourselves on the Moon. There is an ancient computer beneath the surface built by unknown hands. From the dawn of humanity it recorded all information about Earth from the movement of tectonic plates to lives of ameba to thoughts and ideal of every single person. Its purpose is unknown, but what is known is that it hosts a modified version of the Holy Grail War to which all spiritual hackers who can find their way in are invited. Hundreds of magi would fight in an elimination tournament, and the last one standing would get their wish, any wish granted.
You are one of these magi. Prepare to get flashed.
Farla has made a tradition of giving me weird, cheap indie PC games for Christmas. This year’s offering was Science Girls, an RPG about six high school students in a science club who have to fight off an alien invasion. The game is very enthusiastic and well-intentioned, but it botched the execution so very, very badly.
I might as well make something useful out of all the time I spend playing RPGMaker games, so here’s the latest crop of good ones.
Soma Spirits is a neat little RPG about philosophy and choices you should check out. The premise is that, after the world erupted into war, the gods split the world into two spiritual planes: the World of Joy, where everyone is always happy, and the World of Sorrow, which lacks the unchecked emotion that led to the war. This worked pretty well for a while, but now the worlds are becoming unstable and There Can Be Only One. Each god obviously wants their own world to dominate, and you are led through five scenarios where you must solve a dilemma by either curbing unbridled joy or alleviating sorrow. Generally, this comes down to a choice between personal happiness and societal responsibility. I am all about that stuff.
Unfortunately, the conclusion leaves a lot to be desired. The warning signs become obvious the moment you learn there is a true ending. Though the game’s description claims that “you may find that the choices made in Soma Spirits are not so black and white. Every major choice made will have some impact on the story, and there are rarely any ‘correct’ solutions”, there is objectively one correct choice: make a perfectly even number of Joy and Sorrow decisions to create a fully balanced world. Deviate from this at all, and the game makes sure to inform you that you are crazy, stupid, and/or evil. As much as the game loves to tout that every individual decision has logical merit, it doesn’t extend the same tolerance to aggregate decisions.
My computer is just barely able to run this, so let’s check it out! I have not played the demo but figured that there’d be an intolerable level of spoilers out shortly, so I might as well see the opening for myself. (more…)
Tyranny is an old-school RPG made by Obsidian Entertainment as a follow-up to the reasonable success of Pillars of Eternity. It’s… solid is probably the best word for it.
Gladion: …All right. Let’s go.
We sink down with Faba smirking at us. (more…)
This game was advertised as a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment, made by the same people. Let’s see how it holds up.
Firstly, can we all just collectively boggle at how the localizers decided translation is for chumps? Customers should not have to flock to translation sites to know what the title of the series means.
Anyway. Devil Survivor is a spinoff of the Shin Megami Tensei series, and the first in the series I’ve played all the way through. (I tried the first game once and couldn’t get into it.) I’d say it’s very good for the most part, but in the end it kind of goes to Hell. It definitely tries really hard, but it fails to follow through on its ideas properly.
It’s like Christmas in July! Here are thoughts on some of the games from 2016’s Christmas Steam sale.
Inside: To the Moon, Helen’s Mysterious Castle, LiEat, Betrayer, Sunless Sea.
I am, as ever, a moth to folly’s candle.
The Tenth Line is an RPG by the creator of The Reconstruction and I Miss the Sunrise, and represents the developer’s first foray into commercial gamemaking. It is better than its predecessors in some ways — it has a self-contained plot with an actual ending, for one thing — and worse in other ways.
Here there be spoilers, so if you want the abstract: The story is an absolute disaster. I routinely found myself getting lost from line to line in cutscenes, because nothing anyone said or did made the slightest bit of sense. I really hoped that the poor character writing in the last two games was just because there were too many characters to manage, but here there’s a much more condensed cast and scenes still consist of characters chirping out their one character trait and then bending over backwards for the whims of Plot. I’m finally starting to understand people who say game stories take themselves too seriously. This is very much a video game plot, with the story being little more than a vehicle for cool fights and shocking plot twists with little vision for any coherent whole, yet the game clearly seems to be trying to say some deep things about prejudice, religion, and fatalism, despite not being able to deliver. Conversations also go on forever — I’m someone who normally eats up every line of dialogue, but here I routinely found myself saying “Yes, we get it, can we move on please” when talking to NPCs. But even aside from that, the story just felt… really bland, ultimately. The Reconstruction and I Miss the Sunrise may have executed their ideas poorly, but they did have interesting and original ideas. The Tenth Line does not — it’s a very standard fantasy world and fantasy RPG plot, and none of it really stuck with me.
Is it still worth playing for the gameplay? That depends, I suppose. I personally found the system simultaneously overdesigned and lacking in strategical depth. Battles tend to be extremely repetitive and drag out just a bit too long, with most of the strategy revolving around pre-battle setup and very difficult action commands. You can burn items to give your characters bonus strength that slowly degrades, and the game seems to expect you to keep them topped off after every battle but I just can’t be bothered. The platforming puzzles were generally nice; every character has their own jump physics and special abilities they can use to do stuff in the world, and this usually leads to there being multiple ways to progress through the area for each of them. However, there are tons of environmental hazards that serve only to waste your time by knocking characters all the way back to the start of the (rather large) areas. I definitely found it getting pretty tedious by the end, and I didn’t bother with the postgame grinds despite normally being a completionist. My recommendation would be to look at a let’s play and see if it’s something you think you’d enjoy.
You know how long-running horror franchises would inevitably have an installment set IN SPACE in a desperate attempt to cling to life by introducing a superficial new element that doesn’t actually fit the genre? Well, Shadowrun is an old TRPG that can be accurately described as cyberpunk but WITH MAGIC. In 2012 magic came back, a large percentage of people turned into various fantasy races, many animals mutated into mythological beasts, people learned to summon and bind spirits of nature, dragons awoke from their millennia-long slumber and decided that running corporations is a good substitute for hoarding gold. Meanwhile, technology advanced in a classic cyberpunk fashion: prosthetics enhancing your abilities beyond human limits, cybernetic implants allowing full-immersion link to cyberspace inventively called the Matrix, etc.
These events resulted in a weakening and sometimes outright collapse of governments, with corporations essentially taking their place and running the world in an orgy of wild capitalism.
The game takes its name after shadowrunners, the presumed PCs, who are essentially freelance black books operatives hired by various corporations, organized crime syndicates and individual clients as deniable assets to do various shady jobs.
Honestly, my knowledge of the setting is rather limited, and I would appreciate someone chiming in on it. From what I’ve seen of it, it feels that sometimes Shadowrun strikes gold in its design (like how it has literal lizard people dragons – a classic metaphor for greed and malice – essentially running the world through corporate proxies) and other times it’s content to just throw “awesome” concepts together (Magic! Cyberware! Matrix! Samurai!) with little regard to creating a thematically-coherent whole.
But anyway, apparently there are three relatively new RPGs set in this setting, and I’ve decided to check them out. They are… pretty solid, actually.
Journey to Northpass is a short RPG Maker game parodying gender roles. It’s a standard fantasy setup, but all the gender roles are completely flipped. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have much else going for it. The battle system is essentially “press confirm to win”, and though there are sidequests, they’re basically all just simple fetch quests. The story doesn’t take itself seriously at all; the gods of the setting are literally called “Pretentious” and “Apostro’Phe”, in just one example. Cute, but it kinda makes it hard to get emotionally invested in anything.