Tag: videogame

Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade

  04/05/2020       Act      22 Comments

Blazing Blade was localized simply as “Fire Emblem”, because it was the first FE game to officially come West. I wondered, playing this game, if it was a coincidence that the first FE they bothered to send to English speakers was far and away the best one, or if they knew they had a real gem on their hands and were like, “This shit is how we get American’s money.”

Blazing Blade, FE7, is technically the prequel to FE6, but not only do you not have to play FE6 to understand it, I’d go as far as to say you shouldn’t play FE6, since FE7 is so much better that it kind of sets FE6 up as disappointing. The entire plot also causes the plot of FE6 to make zero sense.

Unforutnately I waited too long to write this review and don’t remember nearly as much about FE7 as I should, and I’m afraid I won’t be able to do it justice. But this was a really great game, and I heartily rec it. Like I said, it’s far and away the best of the first 7 FEs. It’s not even close.

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   Fire Emblem, Recommendations, Strategy, Video Games      , , ,

Verdant Skies

  04/01/2020       Act      3 Comments

Hello hello hello my dears! I hope you are all staying indoors. Mr. Act (who is asthmatic) and I (who is without an immune system) are both high-risk and terrified. Every time you think about going out, consider that you might kill me, and maybe reconsider. Or don’t, depending on why you’re reading this.

Anyway, quaran-time has actually has a wonderful effect on my health. I mean, I’m going crazy and getting no vitamin D, but Mr. Act is home all the time, I’m cooking and cleaning because I’m not exhausted by work, and reduced workloads in class mean I can like, read and write for fun? It’s weird.

So, looking over the myriad of things I have in drafts, I thought this would be a good one to push out, because Verdant Skies is a really interesting game that’s actually not that good but I put 30 hours into it anyway for a few reasons. The gameplay is really pretty shitty but it has some wonderful ideas and mechanisms and perhaps most importantly for our typical reader, it’s really committed to making a farm sim that goes above and beyond in terms of race and gender. If those things are important to you this is definitely worth checking out, but if you need high polish and deep gameplay first and foremost it’s probably not for you.

Pulling back a bit though, this is a futuristic space colony farm sim.

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   Sim, Video Games      ,

Fire Emblem: Back Catalogue

  12/11/2019       Act      11 Comments

Hello my loves. It has been a little while.

Y’all surprised me by opting for Fire Emblem over Final Fantasy, and I shall oblige. I’ve been working through the older, never-localized FE games, which I’m going to shove into one post because no one can stop me.

Inside: Shadow Dragon, Shadows of Valencia, New Mystery of the Emblem, Genealogy of the Holy War, Thracia 776 (but not really), Binding Blade

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   Fire Emblem, Strategy, Video Games      , , , , , , ,

Final Fantasy VII

  09/22/2019       Act      27 Comments

So I got involved in the SaGa series recently (yes, I realize what the title of this post is). I’ve really been enjoying it. It’s clear the influence the early games had on RPGs as a whole, and even the later, flubbier games are interesting because they’re always trying to do ambitious things. I’ve played through the three GameBoy games in their entirety, and then I played the first PS2 Game and SNES games (I’m at the final boss of the second one right now). I’ve been doing a shitton of retro gaming lately. (I also scored the original Harvest Moon for SNES for a steal at a local shop and am v v excited to dive into that next.)

All of this is to say that despite how nearly unplayable a lot of old games are, I enjoy them quite a bit (even when I give up on the stupidly hard final bosses like I’m afraid is going to happen with Romancing SaGa 2…), and I think I’m pretty good at keeping them in perspective and seeing them within the context of their original release instead of judging outdated mechanics by modern standards.

So why the fuck can’t I get through Final Fantasy VII?

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   Final Fantasy, RPGs, Video Games      ,

Ori and the Blind Forest, or, Why Do We [ART] What We [ART]

  08/03/2019       Act      8 Comments

Ori and the Blind Forest is a game that got me wondering what I look for in art, and why, and how to approach what art is to me in a review.

This post has two very distinct parts I could not make harmonious; mea culpa. But IMO the second half is more interesting/important so skip to that if you’re bored or w/e.

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   Metroidvania, On Writing, Video Games      , ,

Steam Summer and Winter Sales 2018 QuickPans

  05/04/2019       Act      13 Comments

On the other hand I start radiation next week so here are some pans. You may notice there are twice as many of these; I did not have a good run of Steam sales last year, apparently.

Inside: Pan-Pan, Copoka, Nimble Bun, Yomawari, Salt, Alicemare, htol#NiQ

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   Adventure, Horror, Platformers, Point-and-Click, Precision Platformer, Puzzle, Survival, Video Games, Walking Sims      , , , , , , ,

Tangledeep

  04/26/2019       Act      7 Comments

“It’s… a traditional roguelike,” was Roarke’s summation of this game. “It’s pretty fun. I’m not sure I’d rec it, though.”

‘Mildly fun grindfest with no requirement for emotional investment’ was actually what I was looking for because I’m so tired of like, life and stuff, so oddly enough if he’d been like “I FUCKING LOVE IT” I probably wouldn’t have bought it. As it was, it was indeed a very traditional roguelike that was a mildly fun grindfest that I would not recommend and also exactly what I wanted out of a game at the moment, so score one for human communication.

Spoilers inside, though calling anything ‘spoilers’ in relation to this story is a bit rich.

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   Roguelike      ,

Disgaea: Hour of Darkness

  08/20/2018       Act      1 Comment

You know those made-for-TV movies MST3k and Rifftrax do sometimes, where it obvious it was two episodes of a show that were smooshed together into a ‘movie’ because halfway through the plot resolves and the entire second half is an unrelated plot with completely different characters? That’s this game, except that the first plot was actually very good and I liked it and then 30 hours in the game ended, brought in a new cast, switched genres, and started up a completely different, worse plot, and somehow continued for another 15 hours. The whole thing was so weird, and it was so jarring and the new plot/characters so shitty I just couldn’t finish it. I ended up watching the True End on Youtube to see how the loose ends of the first plot tied up and felt totally satisfied and like I had no more questions, which goes to show how out-of-nowhere the second plot was. The game is largely worth playing through Chapter 10 (I think? It may have been 9). But there’s really no reason to finish it.

I’m publishing this concurrently with the Phantom Brave review because Phantom Brave does all the things Disgaea does well even better, has a coherent plot, and is without all the shitty sexualization, so it’s worth looking at them together, but I had too much to say about each individually for a single dual post to make sense.

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   RPGs, Video Games      , ,
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