Yo.
I just wanted to give a heads-up that sometime in the next few weeks I’m going to private all of my posts and no longer respond to comments posted here. I’ve been putting it off for a long time for sentimental reasons, but the truth is that I’ve just moved on. Click through for some meandering about it if you feel the need, but the tldr is that I’m not 17 anymore, not 24 either, and don’t really want to be, so I’m closing up shop and sailing off into the sunset.
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.
Subnautica is perhaps the best survival game I have played, but in the process I’ve come to believe a lot of the things I dislike about survival games are intractable problems with the genre. You play as the sole survivor of a starship that crash-landed on an alien ocean planet. You start with nothing but a crafting bench, and eventually work your way up to elaborate vehicles and bases, including, ultimately, an escape rocket. In the process you have to manage hunger, thirst, and, of course, oxygen as you must dive deeper and deeper to gather better materials.
If you enjoy survival games you’ll enjoy this, but I have a few nuances to discuss.
This was the first main series title to get an international release, I guess because the moral guardians finally quieted down enough for Atlus to feel comfortable floating their screed about the many evils of Christianity to the rest of the world. But did you know it’s actually not the first entry in the overall franchise to get such a privilege? A few spinoff games got American releases earlier, where the series title was localized as Revelations. That’s genuinely such a great title. “Resurrection of the Goddess” may be literally accurate to the Japanese title, but it’s an artifact title with no meaning for most of the games. But “Revelations” so neatly encapsulates what the games are about both literally and symbolically on so many levels, and it’s a Bible reference!
So of course when it came time to finally bring a main series title international they decided to throw that in the garbage so they could not bother translating the title at all instead, because what is localization.
So it’s time to explore Revelations Untranslated Word Salad III: Nocturne, the third numbered entry which is actually the fourth entry, or sixth if you count the pre-reboot Megami Tensei games. The franchisening has truly begun.
Lot of Ash, an honest to god shiny eevee found in a dumpster fic, and we also end with a burst of people-and-pokemoning. But there’s also some good stuff. Also, a bonus obligative review sneaks in under the wire.
Monster Crown is a mons game by people who either don’t know or can’t be bothered to construct a functional video game.
So many trainers of so little competence. Also, another example of trying to show how good the main character is by giving them a traumatized pokemon, who will of course have no issue belonging to a new trainer going on a badge quest full of battles.
Some varied flavors of self-inserts, one of those ones that’s at once ultragrimdark and yet ridiculously ungrimdark because the characters will somehow manage anyway, and yet another “AU” where a different character is hammered so firmly into the original’s mold they’re repeating the same dialogue.
I did Zoroark Games months ago and finally got around to reviewing them. (more…)
A weird (inadvertantly?) pro-British-Empire-Monarchy fic, a lot of people writing like they’re directing an episode, so much unnecessary and shoddily included religion, yet another fic where a guy is fucking a gardevoir and neither seem concerned she has zero legal rights but this time they’re also apparently fine with that applying to their kid too, a bunch of terrible science, and something with the Dragon Clan that could’ve been interesting but just squanders everything.
As an overall theme, people not really getting the concept of a hook, whether the issue is about failing to deliver on what’s brought up in their summary, failing to deliver on what’s brought up in their first chapter, or failing to even have anything to fail to deliver on.
Also, a smattering of uncomfortable sexual issues of the authors.