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Mar 3rd, 2013 at 20:30:20 - Suikoden V (PS2) |
This is definitely one for the story. Still enjoying that aspect. Battles are tougher, but still usually just "auto-able." I did discover last night though why battles appeared to be getting tougher. I'm 26 hours in and I JUST realized that I had a reserve crew of like 15 other characters to fill my party of 10 (6 active members and 4 extras). I've been playing the entire game only with what story characters go along with me! I've fought entire dungeons with just me and Lyon, autoattacking. Turns out that this WHOLE time I could have had a full part of 6 characters fighting, plus 4 in waiting. Haha. Ooooh, Suikoden...
The reason I never knew this is (a) the game never told me, (b) the instruction manual never told me, and (c) the Menu is clunky and not very user-friendly in general. There is an NPC you get eventually who you can talk to to change party members. If you talk to her, the menu displays the members of your current party, say, David, Lyon, ---, ---, ---, --- where the --- are empty slots. Then on the left-hand side of the screen, it says Reserves or something like that, and it is completely empty, all --- dashes. So I just thought that I didn't have any reserves because the list was empty. But as I've progressed I've 'befriended' a bunch of allies, and I started wondering where in the world they were going. Were they in my castle? Could I use them? Did 'befriend' mean just in terms of the story or did they move to my castle? Where are they physically? What happened to all the items I gave them when they were in my party? So last night before heading off on a mission, I went to this NPC and selected one of the empty --- spaces in my party list. Lo and behold, THEN the list of reserves appears! So now after 26 hours, I have a full party for the first time. I imagine the game will go back to being super easy. Maybe I'll revert to handicapping myself for some challenge. But, I really wish the game had said something about how to add characters, a quick little tutorial once the option becomes available. My main characters are in the high level 30s. All these great new reserve characters are like...8..19...14. But on the plus side they gain like 5 levels per battle when they're that low, so they'll be up over 30 in just a few minutes.
I was also thinking about Japanese characters. Japanese games always have these wacky characters that oftentimes have baffling elements. Like this one guy I got, he has a bird on his head. Why? There's no explanation for it, just hey, he's a guy with a bird on his head. Another guy has a mohawk/rattail/mullet thing. No explanation. Just hey, we like 80s hair metal, so this guy will have really stupid hair. Then there is a race of beavers. Beavers. Why? Well, I guess because the world is penetrated by a river and they need dams, and beavers build dams, so we'll have a race of beavers. The Elder beaver's name is Fuwalafuwalu. I don't know where that came from either. I dunno, these kinds of things make Japanese RPGs just really...silly at times. I'm not bashing silliness. I like silliness, but maybe just the way they do silly in many RPGs like this is too far silly, where for me it crosses over into stupid range. Like really, I want to know why he has a bird in his hair. And why there are sentient beavers. Without explanations of these things, I just say...ok [sigh] and shake my head in confusion.
That's it for now. Dunno how long this one is. Howlongtobeat's main story completions are between 24 and 34 hours, so I may be coming up to the final stretch. Sometimes the site's numbers are low for me though, so I'm going to guess it'll be under 40. Probably finish it up by the end of this coming weekend. Then I dunno what to play. Either start on Persona 4 or clear out some computer games. A is coming to visit in 3.5 weeks, so I'd like to have nothing left hanging when she gets here. Smart planning...
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Mar 3rd, 2013 at 20:01:56 - Toki Tori (PC) |
I've picked this back up, playing when I need a short break at work. Since my last entry, I've beaten all the Slimy Sewers levels and moved on to the water world, where Toki Tori gets a bubble ability. There are air bubbles coming from vents in the ground, and if you walk over one, depending on the size of the vent, you become enveloped in a bubble for x seconds and can float through the water in any direction you choose. Unfortunately, I am stuck on the very first level! There is a part with a 10-second bubble vent and I just cannot make it to where I need to go in 10 seconds. It is maddening! I tried it over and over and over, and tried some other possibilities. Either I'm just not doing it quite right or I'm overlooking something obvious. I'll try again sometime soon with a fresh eye, but might have to Wild Card it. [You get a Wild Card to skip a level and move to the next, but you only get one, so if you get stuck on a subsequent level, you need to go beat the previous level you were on to retrieve your wild card.]
I refuse to use my Wild Card yet though, because that would just be sad to do it on level 1 of a world, and instead have been going back and playing the optional "Hard" levels of the previous worlds. These I *really* enjoy. They are more challenging and require you to think and use objects in different ways. In the first world there was a lot of playing around with using the freeze gun to freeze enemies in just the right spot to use them as blocks. If you didn't figure to freeze enemies and use them for blocks, you would run out of regular block and bridge tools to beat the level. These are much more precise and, while I had complained earlier about 'just memorizing' levels, the difficulty of these and the fact that you're usually only given a couple tools makes memorizing kind of impossible. It's more about figuring out.
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Feb 24th, 2013 at 19:41:36 - Suikoden V (PS2) |
I've played one other Suikoden game in the past. I think it was 4. I enjoyed it, remember a lot of political intrigue, and a bunch of characters in my party. This one isn't necessarily what I remember the old one to be like. A quick summary: political intrigue is there, battles are a joke, towns are too big, there is no map, NPCs don't tell you much, there are a lot of characters, but I don't think I've gotten any of them.
To go into the story would be really complicated. Suffice it to say, you play as Prince [yourname] of the Queendom of Felona. You travel around with various members of the Royal Family and the Royal Knights, and I suppose soon enough, other adventurers and people you meet along the way. I've discovered in my travels thus far that almost every important character I meet knows me already because the entire world seems deeply inbred. They all seem to be related to me, or to another family that is vying for the throne. I bet the two families themselves are related and that will be a big reveal later. I even have proof of incestual tendencies, believe it or not. There is a part where you have to escort your little sister, the Princess, to two holy sites to perform a ritual before she is married (oh yeah, to a member of that rival family! - so they will intermarry, if they haven't already). One of the rituals involves a cleansing, a bath or something. Only the royal women are allowed in, no males, no peeking. Prince [yourname] says "Ew, I don't want to peek anyway." The Princess, offended, says "What's that supposed to mean?!" Then Sialeeds, your AUNT says, "Well, I won't mind if you peek a little!" Aaah! The Princess says "Sialeeds!" Prince [yourname] says pretty much what he said earlier, and Sialeeds says something like "What?! I really don't mind! [wink]" Lady, you're his mom's sister.
Anyway, the story is quite good. Political intrigue games often fall flat because they suffer from "who-the-hell-cares" syndrome. This one though, so far, has made me interested in the characters because it follows them through more of their daily lives, and you listen to lots of dialogue between them, which is alright, but they feel like rather full people. I think I've clocked 9 or so hours, and not a whole lot has happened in the grand scheme of things, but it feels like a lot has. One little event, like these "Sacred Games" to choose a husband for the Princess, is stretched out to take hours. Explore the city, discover a traitorous plot, meet one of the gladiators, rescue a kidnapped woman (all part of traitorous plot), watch the games, watch more of the games, TWIST ENDING, return to castle, go through purification rituals, get to the bottom of the TWIST ENDING. It's very well done and all feels relevant, not like busy work or pointless side quests.
One of the reasons I know I don't feel like I'm doing pointless side quests is, well, because I'm not. In Suikoden games, you can collect 108 Stars, or characters, to join your party. Some of these you get along the way, and many others you have to go out of your way to acquire, do tasks for them, quests, discover places, dungeons, and so on. You clearly don't need 108 characters, so anything over what the main story takes you through is technically unnecessary busy work. Unless you play the game to collect characters, which I don't. So I do feel like I'm moving right along, which is great. This is certainly the current fictional universe I'll be wrapped up in for a while.
The other thing I'll comment on are the battles. They are easy. Ridiculously easy. Like I said, I'm 9 or so hours in, and I've used two healing potions. No healing spells, no other healing. Two potions. There's an 'auto' feature, which I WISH was just like the one in Grandia 3 where it would auto-attack the entire battle for you, and you could set some AI parameters. But (un)fortunately you have to click 'auto' each turn, and it's only basic attacks, no special parameters. In Grandia 3, I remember doing work and reading while battles were resolving themselves. I thought I would get to do the same here, but nah. While cities so far are stupidly big, the dungeons or woods where fights occur are small, so there's not too many battles to be fought, which is good. Anyway, besides trying things out the first few fights, I've just used 'auto' for every single battle and I barely even get hit. My cats could play this game.
Your characters level up really fast too, so I don't think it's possible to fall behind in levels. Therefore, avoiding fights when possible is a valid strategy. You level up when you get 1000 XP, and higher level enemies reward more XP. If you're like 10 levels below an enemy, you're going to gain a few levels every battle. It's...easy. There are these cool formations that I like. You find them in the world and they allow you to place your characters differently on the battlefield, giving bonuses to stats depending on the formation. You can play to your characters' strengths and weaknesses since all characters have an attack range (Short, Medium, Long). Try to match formations with characters' ranges so that you have short attackers in the front, medium in the middle, etc. I haven't used any magic yet. Only basic attacks.
Oh man, I hope this either stays so easy and continues to be 95% story and towns or if story decreases and exploring/combat increases, that the combat gets a little more challenging and thought-provoking. We shall see. Probably no time to play until perhaps Thursday night, or perhaps next week.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Feb 24th, 2013 at 19:43:51.
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Feb 19th, 2013 at 02:52:06 - Canabalt (PC) |
Sitting at work feeling tired and like I've been reading too much. Went to get some tea and decided to boot a game for a bit for some stimulus. Apparently Steam needs an update, and won't update at work anymore. I know I haven't been able to download new Steam games since forever, but I haven't tried to run Steam here in at least 3 months. Must update at home then...
So I decided to try one of the little non-Steam games I got from a Humble Bundle called Canabalt. I don't know why it was in a Humble Bundle because it is a free Flash game online. I usually avoid all Flash games because there are a trillion of them and I'd rather play bigger games. But since I technically paid a tiny amount of money for Canabalt in a bundle, I'm playing, dammit.
Canabalt is an endless running game, and is apparently (from reading a little) quite revered. I can see why. It's got a ton of style. It's grayscale pixel graphics and a nice futuristic electronic soundtrack featuring a couple songs. The backstory appears to be something about robots attacking, and I'm running, running across rooftops. I was surprised that, upon my second run, the spot I died was not in the same spot. The levels are randomly generated! This is awesome because upon that second run, I was like, ok, this sucks, I have to start memorizing where windows are...but I didn't! Instead I had to quickly react to every new rooftop.
My #1 killers were said windows. Those are hard because you have to accurately judge how hard to press the jump button. All you can do in the game is jump, and you can hold it for a longer jump or tap it for a shorter jump, and whatever in between. As you run, you build up speed, making your longer jumps really long. When windows suddenly appear, and you're flying across a rooftop, getting that light touch on the jump key is tough, after 15 minutes of playing at least - I was already getting better at it. Other obstacles include these things that pop up from the (middle it seems) of rooftops that kill you, grind you to dust or whatever the death message says. Just jump over those. Then there are boxes and chairs that, if you hit them, slow you down. I found these are actually real useful to manage your speed. I'd run into them sometimes on purpose to slow down a bit. It seems the distances between buildings are determined (when I don't know) based on how fast you're going. So the slower you are, the easier the windows are to jump into because you have more time to see them coming and gauge how hard you need to jump. But if you hit too many boxes (sometimes there will be 2 right next to, or on top of, one another), that's bad because you slow down too much and might not be able to jump far enough. The goal of the game is to get as high a score as possible. I made it to over 3000, my personal best after 15 minutes.
Problem is that once I looked up from the game (after halfway through my session and at the end) the back of my desk, all my books, my other monitor, it was all moving left to right like my Canabalt character. Uuuungh, my head and stomach said. I got up and walked around a minute after the first time, and put my head down after the second. I started feeling better about 10 minutes after turning it off. What nonsense is that? So, as cool as I find Canabalt to be, I'll have to let that poor guy die by robots because I'm not going to get nauseous to run him across rooftops to safety (or quick and painful death, in my case). And that's too bad.
This is the...third notable endless running game I've played. This is like a genre now, right? Canabalt, Mirror's Edge (loved), and Temple Run (didn't care much for). I'm sure there are a ton more. What is it? Endless running games? Always running? Newton's First Law games? Jumpjumpjump games? Or swipeswipeswipe on phones and tablets?
Unnngh. This game did nothing help me get back to work!
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