Inside: Death’s Gambit, Ghost Song, Kemono Jihen
Death’s Gambit
Metroidvania
This is 2D Dark Souls. The core mechanics are almost identical: Point-build level up system, the same currency is used for both levels and items, there’s stamina and dodge rolling and estus flasks. It makes a few simplifications I appreciated: There is a corpse run mechanic, but you only lose an estus flask and not all your money, and you can skip it by recalling your lost flasks for some currency. There is less equipment and stats are simpler to understand — in particular, armor simply boosts your stats directly instead of providing needlessly-convoluted defensive stats. Additionally, if you lose to a boss, you get a portion of its money drop based on how close you got to beating it, which is a nice way to throw a bone to struggling players. However, it does not simplify nearly enough to fix all the problems with Dark Souls. There are still way too many mechanics to keep track of during pitched battles, and I frequently forgot to use my abilities and items. The upgrade system is really awkward when there are multiple weapons of each type, one of which is objectively worse than the others; there really should have just been one of each as in Unworthy. And as in Dark Souls, fast travel is withheld until far too late in the game.
Many parts of the game also felt half-baked or like they were pulling in different directions. The classes are wildly unbalanced because strength is used for both shields and weapons while the other offensive stats are only used for weapons, and there are way fewer finesse weapons than strength weapons on top of that. The final segment of the game features a segment where you’re supposedly trapped in an area, but you can still teleport out to faff about with sidequests whenever you want, which kills the pacing. The text is also riddled with grammatical errors that have no business being in a commercial game.
Story is “What if Dark Souls, but more grimdark,” complete with the nonsense death cultism but justified with even stupider cliches. “Immortality is bad because it attracts an evil god” is a non-sequitor. What does that have to do with real life? What are you trying to say with this? Why was this worth telling a story about? I may have hated the death cultism in Dark Souls but at least it was engaging with real religious philosophy. This is just nothing.
Ghost Song
Metroidvania
Dark Souls crossed with Metroid. I liked it overall but it does a lot of little things that annoy me — characters have to be spoken to multiple times to complete their conversations, there are too few fast travel points, and not only is there a corpse run mechanic but you suffer max HP damage every time you die, encouraging death spirals. (I’ve said this before but to reiterate, corpse run mechanics are bad for exploration-focused games. You should be allowed to give up and explore somewhere else if you find yourself against a brick wall.) I also disliked that the protagonist was characterized as pacifistic yet you’re always railroaded into combat.
I did like the heat mechanic, though. Your blaster overheats if you use it continuously, sharply inhibiting its damage and rate of fire; however, the heat makes your melee weapons much stronger, creating a synergistic gameplay style where you trade off between ranged and melee. It’s a nice way to mix up both Metroid and Dark Souls style combat by forcing you to vary your tactics instead of doing the same thing all the time.
There is a surprisingly involved story, but it seems I missed some of it by not talking to characters at the right times, which was annoying. It generally feels like a teaser for a larger story rather than something self-contained, as it keeps bringing up worldbuilding details that are never explained or elaborated on. Like, is Saymund objectively right about ghosts and gornah, or is he crazy? I also found the ending very unsatisfying.
Kemono Jihen / Monster Incidents
Manga/Anime (2016/2021)
Billed as an adventure story about human/monster hybrids who fight monsters with special powers, actually just a vehicle for the author’s blatant rape + breeding kink. It only takes seven episodes to hit us with “One of the characters’ mom was continually violently raped by monsters as part of a eugenics program to produce a monster superbaby.” There’s no non-porn explanation for this; this is a modern setting where IVF exists. (The story even goes out of its way to show us the researcher had an artificial insemination device… that he apparently never used, because also the mom was literally chained to a table with manacles to force her to have actual sex with the monsters. This is shown in pretty graphic detail, because that was very necessary.) Then the very next arc reveals that one of the characters is part of a one-gender race that only produces boys every 100 years, so obviously as soon as the boys hit puberty they’re turned into breeding stock because that’s clearly the only way yuki-onna can reproduce. (Yes, the author picked ice ghosts for the subject of his elaborate breeding kink.) None of this was necessary or remotely appropriate for a series targeted at young adults, thank you. Can people please just write porn instead of cramming porn into their respectable stories?
Narratively it is as disappointing and paper-thin as all masquerade fantasy is. Police run into freaky monster problems so constantly they have the protagonist on speed dial, but also somehow nobody knows about the supernatural and it’s very important they keep up the masquerade because *mumble mumble*. It was pretty surreal watching this after Tonari no Youkai-san considered how supernatural entities would actually affect human society.
Structurally, it also feels like it’s ripping off Mob Psycho. The protagonist is an extremely autistic-coded middle schooler who is absurdly overpowered and effortlessly defeats every opponent, and joins a supernatural detective agency headed by an older man who fosters a bunch of other kids like him. Only this is played completely straight instead of acknowledged as absurd. I checked and Mob Psycho started serialization a good 4 years before this, so the author definitely knew of it.