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:
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.
Continuing where we left off. A much weaker showing this time, with a lot of games I couldn’t even finish.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Another RPG by the developer of Sojourner. I had hoped he had learned some lessons and improved from last time. He did not.
I really enjoyed this! It reminded me a lot of UnderTale with how personalized (and delightfully silly) every enemy was, and I’m impressed by how much strategy they got out of pretty simple mechanics with the three regular attacks. I also loved the Metroidvania-like feel of getting new exploration abilities along with your battle abilities and just, it was really cool!
I just finished the first Paper Mario. It was good, and surprisingly different from Superstar Saga! The action commands were much less difficult and complex, but that helped the game regain that tactical element I mentioned. I can definitely see how it started as a sequel to Super Mario RPG.
The sequel to Paper Mario. It features many improvements to battles and core gameplay that I greatly appreciated, but everything else was a bit of a letdown. The writers tried to do something different with the plot by using an all-new setting and villain this time, but I felt they lacked the charm of Paper Mario‘s. There was also a disconcerting rise in Anime Horniness.
Super Paper Mario is the third entry in the Paper Mario series, and markedly different from its predecessors. It’s now a platformer with RPG elements rather than a turn-based RPG, and the playable characters are entirely comprised of established Mario characters rather than new ones. Overall, I liked these changes, and I think the game is a much better experience than The Thousand-Year Door overall. The plot was also much more complex and compelling this time around, though it does unfortunately suffer from the kiddie-game problem of needing to signpost all its twists with sledgehammer levels of subtlety.
This is the sequel to Superstar Saga, and represented a jump from GBA to DS. The main gimmick is that the brothers go back in time to team up with their baby selves, who are controlled with the DS’ X and Y buttons. The babies can also contribute to attacks in battle, making the action commands more complicated.
The game was decent but nothing outstanding. I think I liked Superstar Saga better overall.
The third game in the Mario & Luigi series. I played the original DS version a long time ago as a kid, so I picked up the 3DS remake for this one to see what was different.
The big selling point of this entry is that Bowser is a playable character, and in fact the main protagonist. At the start of the game he is tricked by Fawful (the understudy of the villain from Superstar Saga) into eating everyone in the Mushroom Kingdom, forcing Mario and Luigi to work with him from within his body to fix things.
This was a really great game, much improved from Partners in Time. As I’ve said previously, I love Bowser, and getting to play as him was a wonderful power trip. He and the brothers had distinct playstyles, including in the overworld, and I loved all the bizarre levels inside Bowser’s body. It still lacks some of the things I liked about Superstar Saga (no magic :( ), but manages to be good in a different way rather than feeling like a downgrade as Partners in Time did.