T w e n t y S i d e d
Not much this week, just taking our time with Terraria.
We’ve been hanging out post Plantera, waiting for the Angler to give us the materials for the shellphone. I think my favorite feature in this version is the banner menu, going on a mining trip and not having banners fill my precious inventory space. Also happy April fools day I forgot about it so I don’t have anything silly lined up so, how’s everyone else this week?
Silent Hill Turbo HD II
I was trying to make fun of how Silent Hill had lost its way but I ended up making fun of fighting games. Whatever.
Dear Hollywood: Do a Mash Reboot
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
Was it a Hack?
A big chunk of the internet went down in October of 2016. What happened? Was it a hack?
This is Why We Can’t Have Short Criticism
Here's how this site grew from short essays to novel-length quasi-analytical retrospectives.
Project Button Masher
I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.
Finished off Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. The ancient temple was very long and I really didn’t understand the ending very well. Still don’t really get what was going on with the Zach segments. Also it put 3 random party members against a new monster and I didn’t have Assess and I really did not want to start the fight over to get the enemy intel, ah well.
I may give a shot to hard mode just because I really do enjoy the combat but I wish I got the story more and I like a lot of the adaptations they’ve made from the original but the fact that they need to throw in an epic boss fight at the “end” just… doesn’t work very well, same as it didn’t work that well in Remake.
I’m curious what direction they’ll go for the next one. Like, they’re going to feel obligated to make an even bigger and more open world, probably, and have all of the locations from this game as part of it, and I just don’t know if that’s going to be fun. Also I’m suspicious of their ability to tie things up in one more game. Playing Cid and Vincent will probably be cool.
Also the game had not just one but two occasions where someone grew up being totally lied to about one of their relatives to “protect” them and man, that’s a miserable thing to do to someone.
Triangle Strategy continues. Second Route, this time Maximum Sacrifices; every choice where we can throw someone away to save ourselves, we’re taking it. And you know what… the plot straight up can’t handle it. I mentioned before that every choice basically converges again two chapters later. Well, I actually didn’t know-know that because I mostly made the same choices the last two times I played, but this route, two chapters into a choice, reached a story beat that I was sure could not be converged. The problem was, I was right… but it converged anyway. A character basically showed up and Deus Ex Machina’d us with an “I decree that the next chapter will start under these conditions,” which did not and cannot follow previous events. I think it contradicts literally everything we did the last two missions. There’s no way this was the plan; this must have been a deadline issue. I would almost say it would be better to just have the one, canon route, except the voting process of choosing the routes is one of the best parts of the game.
I don’t know who on the development team has a fetish for these cubic thimblepuppet characters, but this is the least justified sex scene I’ve seen in their games. At least in the Octopath games the Lego Sex stories are setting up a villain, but here, this is seriously the least villainous thing Incompetent Sade Dracula has done. The other route didn’t have this and was better off for it.
I also unlocked a great level for leveling up underleveled characters; the enemies don’t start aggressive, and there are bushes you can kill that grant enemy-level xp, meaning I can safely grind that Level 4 character I’ve been ignoring all game up to the current mission level of 46. Now, the only reason to do that is to unlock their stories, which is… probably not worth it. But, I’m pretty sure I’m going to do it anyway. They’ve been bugging me.
Demonschool is basically just noise at this point. It was a bit too silly to start with, and then was entirely too silly by, I’d say Chapter 3, and it’s continued to get sillier every chapter. We’re currently fighting, like, the concept of things taking time to grow. We’re going to punch vegetables into maturity.
I assume my post got auto-nuked by some keyword filter or other, so I’ll just put in the joke I left out the first time in hopes the first post will be recovered. Ahem.
“Triangle Strategy won’t let a thing like utter unbelievability stop them from converging this story route; they will knock the plot in sideways with a sledgehammer and weld it together with the white-hot flames of their own burning script.”
Mostly coop play of Palworld. The genetrooper boss on top of the mountain is still to tough for us. A third, at most, of his health bar was depleted when the time ran out. But we are doing Lv. 52 dungeons now, and as long as we aren’t attacked by an army of ninjas we are doing fine.
Solo I continued One Piece: Odyssey and Final Fantasy VII: Remake Integrale. The first being a good JRPG, the second not so much. I met Aerith now, after a tedious bullet spongy fight, followed by a rather tactical fight against Reno.
And for something different than JRPGs I started Deathloop. I haven’t warmed up to the game yet. It has the fantastic level design known from the Dishonored series – but this time loop / rogue lite thing … I don’t know yet.
Analog I played Rajas of the Ganges for the first time. The decision space is good, but it might have a leading-player-gets-better-faster problem, that could only be countered by hate-drafting. Further plays will tell.
Still playing Suikoden III. I’m impressed by how with the Tri-View system — three different main characters who have related but separate stories, any of whom could end up as the main character after you complete all three of their chapters — there does seem to at least potentially be a “best” way through the chapters — you can run them in any order — but they work in any order. For example, I always do Hugo->Chris->Geddoe->Thomas (who has two optional chapters) and at the end of Hugo’s Chapter 3 you end up where the Flame Champion is and Chris has gotten there first, and then a mystery character arrives who I know is Geddoe from his chapters and from having played the game. It might have been better to do Chris’ story first so as to not spoil the surprise, but doing it in this order works as well because now you’d be curious about how she got there.
I’m still enjoying it, and am now pondering whether to replay Suikoden V after this or moving on to the updated Persona 3.
I completed bot A Long Way Down, and Ghosts and Goblins Resurrection. Or rather, I did a single playthrough of both of their story modes, then realised there was more to do (roguelite dungeons in ALWD, and second playthrough in G&GR with final super baddie boss). I don’t really fancy second playthroughs to be honest.
That takes me to 10 games completed this year (not start to finish, just got to the ‘end’ (credits) this year.) I need to step it up to get back on track for 100. Currently that makes me on track for only 40.
both*
I beat Silksong.
Specifically, I beat Act 3 of Silksong. It was long, and difficult, and some of the challenges seemed truly insane at first before I sat down to think them over and figure things out (and even when I understood what to do, implementation was often difficult), but in the end I filled out the Hunter’s Journal, found all but two materia, then went back to the Abyss and battled my way through to the final cinematic.
Somehow, it wasn’t even that hard. Like… it wasn’t easy by any stretch, but measured purely in terms of how long it took to conquer a boss, The Last Sinner was actually the worst for me by a significant margin. Maybe that tells you something about my playstyle; I dunno. Or maybe it just means that after going through that trial by fire, I finally Got Gud(TM)?
The bizarre thing is that since putting the game down I’ve been tempted a couple times to go back and try a speedrun or even Steel Soul mode, but… well, let’s be honest; it would be extremely frustrating for me. I fully intend to not even touch the game until the DLC comes out.
In the meantime, I’ve been doing some light puzzlers:
1. A sort of Boggle-esque series of word-finding games, confusingly titled Wordle. I got them all on sale for about a dollar, but I can’t especially recommend the series. You get the sense that whoever designed the games isn’t a native speaker of English; some of the puzzles would be insultingly easy to a child, while others essentially demand that you use hints (e.g. trying to pick out a 12-letter obscure flower name that twists a winding diagonal path through a 7×7 letter grid), and the latter games in the series feel like cheap, even meaningless Achievements spam that left me feeling unfulfilled.
2. A lightweight mashup of picross and minesweeper called Polimines. It was just a single evening’s worth of entertainment, but I also picked it up for a very reasonable price and it left me wanting more, which is always a good sign.
3. And last but most, a very well-put together picross/nonogram called Pepper’s Puzzles. The presentation is polished, the puzzles come in good variety, and the tutorial actually points beginners in the direction of working out the deeper mathematical tricks of the genre, which is a lovely touch. If you’re into that sort of mathematical brain-teaser at all, I’d recommend this one.
I’m still pondering what to do with myself next. Polish off some more lightweights from my backlog? Maybe I’ll just back off of gaming itself for a while, at least until next time Hades II goes on sale? Maybe I’ll get back to chasing a couple of the longer-term new achievements in Terraria, or go achievement-hunting in some other game(s) that I haven’t picked up recently? We’ll see.
Congrats on the Silksong!
:D