Mystic Quest for the SFC with the intent of finishing it before the 31st!
From the little I played of it previously, it seemed fine, far from what people complain about it, specially if thinking “it’s a kid’s JRPG”. Also been partaking in the !12in12@sh.itjust.works challenge, and this month’s been specially long for me.
Finally convinced some friends to take on GTFO with me. It’s tough, but fair and extremely punishing if mistakes.
I absolutely love it.
I haven’t been thinking much on gaming over the past week, but you reminded me that a couple weeks ago I started up the old classic for Windows 3.11…
Castle of the Winds
I’ve got it in a savestate in a virtual machine right now. Despite the game looking like it was drawn by a 5 year old and not having any audio whatsoever, it’s actually a pretty good game for 1993 when it was made and released.
I’m replaying Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War for the first time since they released. They make absolutely no sense from a wider lore standpoint, but they’re some incredibly stupid fun games, so imo it balances out. I’m playing on PC, and I actually got a trainer for each one so I could have an easier time playing them. I only really use infinite focus and arrows though.
Similarly, I’m playing the 2013 Devil May Cry. I’m not attached to the story and the gameplay is pretty great.
I finished Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter (the remake) on Monday. It dragged a bit in the middle but the last few hours were excellent. Really looking forward to the 2nd Chapter whenever I get around to it.
I’m now a few hours into Avowed and so far I’m loving it. Too early to say much more. It was a real pain in the arse getting decent FPS though (had to mess around with Optiscaler). This is my first experience of one of those UE5 games.
I cannot put down Aground. I played the demo on PC and bought the full game on Switch. Controls were clearly designed for mouse and keyboard, but the mapping to joycons is satisfactory 99% of the time.
I have played for dozens of hours and have no good sense of how far through the game I am; it just keeps throwing more at me. Some goals are made explicit via quests, some are alluded at only through NPC dialogue, and some are just “explore and find out”.
It’s very clearly in the Minecraft / Terraria genre of “wake up alone and start punching trees” but sufficiently different from either to be a novel experience. Combat is very simple but it’s also not a huge part of the game. The main loop is: meet a new NPC who gives you a tool or blueprint » explore for resources » make a new building for your village » craft better gear » open new area » repeat; though the loops start to overlap at a certain point as your villages grow.
Backlog Cleanup Duty continues. This week I finally finished Ninja Gaiden 4 on Hard. That last boss was a real struggle for me, I actually didn’t think I was going to make it for a long time. I think maybe I should have replayed the whole last level as I didn’t realise it was a boss rush in the end and I used up too many items on the first of the three final bosses (luckily the middle boss was a cakewalk). I still have to play the DLC but I may come back for that later.
Honestly, I have a lot of thoughts about this game. The best way I can sum it up is: NG4 has absolutely great combat, but it should have been a spin-off called Ninja Gaiden: Blood Raven instead of Ninja Gaiden 4. They should have completely removed Ryu from this game and let Platinum Games do their own thing with Yakumo without it needing to impede on the mainline franchise.
Now, as you may have noticed, I have not yet said that NG4 is a great game. Because when it comes to non-combat elements I have quite a lot of issues with it. The level design is bland - it’s basically just a bunch of corridors, sometimes with a side path. The art direction is also way less interesting than previous games. This is just your regular Japanese cyberpunk setting. It is better than NG3, but nowhere near NG1&2. This is also one of the worst cases of Yellow Paint-itis I’ve ever seen (literally all levels are just hallways, why the fuck is this much yellow paint slathered everywhere?). There are way too many visual effects - I was forced to install a shader level mod to remove a bunch because I literally couldn’t see what the fuck was happening in the combat disco. The story is bad - but not really fun bad, just boring. The love interest angle is weak and unnecessary. English voice acting is pretty flat. The new protagonist Yakumo is not compelling at all, he’s just a grumpy emo kid. There is a bunch of annoying “parkour” and rail grinding and surfing and shit which is effectively just QTEs with some makeup - we don’t want that in our Ninja Gaidens we want to kill a bunch of mooks. There are a bunch of small QOL problems that piss me off because they would be so easy to fix but nobody bothered. The save “system” is a prime example: not only is it autosave only, but the save points are idiotic. It will often autosave just before you reach a shop, so each time you die or reload you have to re-buy everything and turn in/accept new missions all over again. If you’re doing Purgatory Trials and die the reload point is before entering the arena. So every time you die you have to walk up, again re-buy whatever you want in the shop and then once again sit through the title card slowdown of starting a trial. And you will die a lot in purgatory trials. I could go on.
…buuut at the same time, the moment-to-moment combat of this game is absolutely great! It’s fast, perhaps faster than any Ninja Gaiden before it. It’s brutal. It has more freedom of creative expression with fluid combos than any previous Ninja Gaiden. Does it feel like a mainline Ninja Gaiden title? No. It feels like a spin-off. It feels like exactly what it is: a Platinum Games take on Ninja Gaiden. But that is still most likely the very best action combat of any game released in the past couple of years. And if you’re a CAG fan, if you’re an action gamer, does anything else matter?
