Category: RPGs

Into the Breach and Star Renegades

  10/22/2021       St. Elmo's Fire      8 Comments

Into the Breach and Star Renegades are two very different games from two completely different developers, but they have a number of things in common I thought worth analyzing.

The premise of both games is identical: Alien invaders are attacking, and you must defend humanity by traveling across timelines and passing on your knowledge and technology every time. Both games have no true ending: After the end of every run, win or lose, there is always another timeline under threat that you must jump to.

What’s interesting is that despite this similarity, their execution of story elements is diametrically opposite, and both left me unsatisfied in different ways.

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   On Writing, Roguelike, RPGs, Video Games      ,

Mario & Luigi: Dream Team

  11/27/2021       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment

This is the fourth and final Mario & Luigi game. It might be my favorite in the entire series; the creators clearly listened to criticisms of the previous games and went all-out in their ambitions.

Mario & co. are invited to a relaxing vacation on a resort island; obviously, things do not go as planned. The theme of this game is the power of dreams: Luigi has the ability to open a portal to the dream world when he sleeps, which allows Mario to revive the original inhabitants of the islands, who are… pillow people. Yes, they lean into the aesthetic pretty hard. This dual-world gameplay works similarly to Bowser’s Inside Story, where the real world is in 3D while the dream world is 2D with a greater emphasis on platforming challenges.

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   Mario & Luigi Series, Recommendations, RPGs, Video Games     

Monster Sanctuary

  03/12/2022       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment

Monster Sanctuary is a cross between a monster catcher RPG and a Metroidvania. I am interested in both of those things, so I decided to check it out.

This game is better than Pokemon in every conceivable way except for the most important one: Monster designs. As you can see in the banner above, monster designs are incredibly basic, usually consisting of real plants, animals, or mythical creatures with only minor twists. And those tiny overworld sprites are all you’re getting; you don’t get to see detailed closeups in battle like you do in Pokemon. This is highly unfortunate, because the game is otherwise very enjoyable and has a number of features I wish Pokemon would include.

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   Metroidvania, Monster Collector, Recommendations, RPGs, Video Games     

Paper Mario: Sticker Star and Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam

  03/20/2022       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment

Paper Mario: Sticker Star

It is as terrible as the prophets foretold.

Sticker Star feels like it belongs to a completely different series than its predecessors. The gameplay and writing have both been gutted: There are no friendly NPCs except Toads, Bowser doesn’t get a single line of dialogue, and you can’t level up. Yes, that’s right, they removed the RPG from their RPG. I was willing to go into this with an open mind, because the idea of redefining RPG battles to specific set pieces rather than copy-and-paste encounters fueled only by extrinsic motivation is intriguing to me; it’s the guiding principle behind Wine & Roses, also known as the best game ever. But no, encounters are still just as samey as in the previous games, you just no longer get any XP from them.

And this feels minor next to everything else, but the set design is godawful. Everything is literally made out of cardboard. We are also repeatedly informed that all the characters are literally paper, unlike in the previous games where it was clearly just an art style. I don’t know why anyone involved thought this was a good idea. We experience art for the immersion, not to be reminded of the artifice.

Apparently this was all due to executive meddling, so make of that what you will. The more I hear about Shigeru Miyamoto, the more I feel like he is the Elon Musk of Nintendo.

Onto greener pastures.

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

Rune Factory 5

  03/25/2022       Act      4 Comments

Rune Factory 5 is a game so incredibly disappointing that I have come out of retirement to complain about it.

The way I would describe this game is: It’s like no one at the developer was familiar with crafting games other than Atelier, and then they crammed RF4 to see what the series was like, and then half-assed the production of the game.

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   RPGs, Sim      , ,

Disco Elysium

  04/01/2022       St. Elmo's Fire      13 Comments

This is everything I wanted Torment: Tides of Numenera to be.

Disco Elysium is an RPG with no combat system. It has every other part of an RPG: levels, skills, equipment, and items. But instead of combat, all your skills are based around investigation and conversation; and you will need them, because you play as an insane, dysfunctional detective who nevertheless has to solve a very important murder.

The game is bizarre and wonderful, and a model for how nonviolent RPGs can work.

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   Recommendations, RPGs, Video Games     

Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth

  05/04/2022       St. Elmo's Fire      1 Comment

My investigations into the mons scene continue, this time with Digimon. This is the most Pokemon-like Digimon game I’ve seen: You can raise any digimon you see and the pet sim elements have been removed to focus purely on battling. This makes it very easy to compare with Pokemon, which is useful because it does a number of things differently.

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   Monster Collector, RPGs, Video Games      ,

Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling

  08/03/2022       St. Elmo's Fire      2 Comments

Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling is a love letter to the Paper Mario series, which I previously reviewed and greatly enjoyed. It has the same papercraft art style and gameplay centered around action commands, but offers several new ideas of its own, such as a setting full of adorable bug people and non-silent protagonists.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t live up to the hype. On its own merits, it’s… okay? But it does not live up to its inspiration. I liked some of the gameplay changes but disliked others, and the writing is a mess.

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   RPGs, Video Games     

Fallout: New Vegas

  08/14/2022       St. Elmo's Fire      11 Comments

Another oldie I’m finally getting around to.

Like all of Obsidian’s catalog, Fallout: New Vegas is a beautifully-written game that should have been a visual novel. The RPG elements, the shootouts with random suicidal raiders, and the endless trekking through acres of samey wasteland and copy/pasted buildings full of useless garbage items so thick you stop paying attention to item pickups altogether, add nothing to the experience. The Hardcore survival mechanics were an interesting idea, but are rendered meaningless by the fact the wasteland is a veritable Eden of endlessly-replenishing food, to the point you’ll probably accumulate more than you’ll ever need just by wandering around the starting areas.

But in between the chaff, the story is, as per usual with Obsidian, exceptional.

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   Action, Recommendations, RPGs, Video Games      ,

Child of Light

  08/26/2022       St. Elmo's Fire      3 Comments

Child of Light is an RPG whose battle system intrigued me. It expands on Final Fantasy‘s ATB system to make it more tactical and engaging instead of just a reskinned initiative system — though, in the circular nature of things, it actually bears a lot of similarity to FF4’s original ATB system. I’ll tentatively recommend it, but only if you’re particularly interested in RPG battle systems.

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   Recommendations, RPGs, Video Games     

Shin Megami Tensei: SNES Trilogy

  12/25/2022       St. Elmo's Fire      14 Comments

Time to spice up this Christmas with some good old-fashioned blasphemy! A while back I reviewed and mostly enjoyed the Devil Survivor games, which are a spinoff of the Shin Megami Tensei series (or Resurrection of the Goddess if you’re not a weeb who thinks leaving things untranslated makes them cooler). The main series is also highly praised, so I decided to check it out, especially since as a Pokemon fan I’m interested in monster-catching games, and this one actually predates Pokemon by a significant margin! I chose to skip the NES Megami Tensei games and start with the SNES Shin Megami Tensei trilogy.

Sidenote: Every game starts with a standard “Any similarity between our characters and real people or organizations is purely coincidental” disclaimer, which, LOL. LOLOLOLOL.

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