A List of Games Attempted: March & April 2021

Herein is a list of games I tried or am trying, and had thoughts upon, despite not beating them - if they can be beaten at all. 

Bravely Default II

I prepared myself by playing Bravely Second, the direct sequel to the first game, and turns out - that might have burned a degree of my interest in this one! This one wipes the slate clean of the previous lore, starting fresh in a world of, well, crystals and magic and Asterisks, those physical embodiments of job classes. And it leans much more directly into Asterisks, making them a key plot point, rather than a loose conceit to explain how your character learned how to do the black mage job. 

The presentation is kinda remarkable. I wasn't amazed by the demo, but once you sink into it, it really looks & feels like a moving storybook, with lush backgrounds and itty bitty cutie characters. Yet those characters, with their hackneyed personalities, and the things they do in the motion of the plot, all of that is boilerplate. There's not much that raises my eyebrow, in terms of shifting the tropes of the genre, which the first two games readily and happily did. 

But those two games also ate their RPG Classics cake, too. And mechanically, this one's on par, or perhaps better, than the previous ones. Combat's tricky, juggling stats and equipment and skills amid the various job classes, and that's fun! Nothing's revolutionary or even super weird, but the depth & difficulty of the combat feels refreshing, not unlike the similarly featured Octopath Traveler. OT also had story problems, though, and a unique storybook artstyle, though of a different aesthetic. In any ways, this one fell to the backburner, but I imagine I'll return to it, in time.

Battle Brothers

I love strategy games. I like moving the little guys along a grid or hex field, as other little guys move against mine. I eyed this one on PC years ago, but as I moved away from PC gaming, I wished it would make the jump to Switch. And it did! Without too many control issues, either!

The gist is, you're the head of a mercenary gang in a relatively generic fantasy world. Grimdark shit, but you're in the muck, not in the halls of castles with kings and princesses and magic. No, you're scraping together coin to pay & feed your men, while butchering bandits and being butchered by them in turn. You recruit your Brothers, equip them, train them, and try your damndest to keep those dingdongs alive. 

For they shall die. Rapidly. I had to restart probably five or six times before I figured out a good early strategy - only hire a few dudes and equip two lines, one with shields that are always up and one with ranged stuff that they can reliably use - before I survived more than a week in-game. I bounced between towns, taking on jobs, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing. But so far, I've yet to renege on a contract I took, though based guides I've read, it is something I should consider in the future.

For you are a mercenary, not a knight, and you should play like it. If you need to rob a caravan to make ends meet, then you might need to do that. As a default-good player, I'm not quite ready to do that sort of dirt, but then again, the Brothers are hungry and in need of drink. We'll see what the future holds, as I'll be returning to this one later.

Warframe

I've got a lot more to say on this one, but suffice to say - one sleepless night, I watched a video about Warframe, and I finally was intrigued. So, I got in. And uh, I played a lot. It's fascinating, and good, but as I'll say in many more words, I think I might have had enough. 

Atelier Rorona

Sometimes, you just need to forget the worries of the world, and become an anime alchemist pretty girl. The nearly two-decade long JRPG series wiggled its way onto the Switch, and something about it always intrigued me. Laid back vibe? Collecting & sythesizing items? A focus on characters in a non-apocalytic story? All of that spoke to me, atop the shameful anime aesthetic that, yes, I like. I liked the anime, and I like the anime, and I shall in the future like the anime. So I pick this one up, a remaster of a PS3 game, the first in a trilogy, which is only one of several trilogies available - there are, I think, 12 of these available on the Switch, each grouped into their own story-worlds by trilogy.

My experience was mixed, though. I really liked all those above-listed qualities, with the music being a surprise in how charming it is. The charming vibe runs deep in this one. But I kinda hate the barebones combat, of which there is a not-insignificant amount, and the sythesizing isn't complicated enough. Yes, I was able to roleplay a ditzy anime girl who loves her friends, being thrust into taking over an atelier shop by her irresponsible mentor, and yes, I made friends with the gruff townhall representative, the prickly rich girl, and also, the guy who serves me coffee, and we all adventured and gathered and such. 

The game's structured by days, which serve as time currency. You have an assignment you must complete, hopefully with some aplomb, within three months, and everything you do - craft, quest, move between locations, rest to regain HP/MP - takes time. It seems daunting, but I didn't have too much trouble with it, and burned through probably half the three years of the game's duration. For the first time in a while, I was driven by the vibe of the game, or perhaps its vague spirit, rather than any one aspect. In short, I get the appeal, like reading a few romance novels of various styles and spiciness, and seeing the merit & appeal of each to its prospective reader. This, like any long-running series or oft-missed genre, has its appeals, and they appeal to me.

Yet, the combat, the alchemy. Those hurt this one. I'm not sure if I'll return to this or if I've had enough, but there will come a day of stress in the coming week or month or year, and I think then is when I shall become Rorona, the anime chemist, once again.

Monster Hunter Rise

As of this writing, this game has been out for a month, and I have not yet fully formed my thoughts on it, as I am too busy trying to get an Almudron gem to drop. MORE TO SAY LATER

Forager

As MHR bore down upon me like a hurricane, I needed other games to dip into. Things that were not as intensive as soloing a Rajang with a hammer, just to see if I could. The heart must rest, sometimes.

And in Forager, I found some relief. The game is a fine example of grinding - you are a lil guy on a lil island, and you got a pickaxe. Hit the stuff, gather the stuff, build a thing. That thing? It makes other things, so hit the stuff, gather the stuff, use the thing to build a thing. Etcetera and forward and upward. The numbers, they are going up.

I stopped playing and uninstalled the game when I could hit stuff and it would explore, effectively hitting the stuff around it, while across my grid-shaped archipelago, things I made automatically hit stuff and collected the stuff, and my stuff was in this stuff-cloud, which automatically fed my stuff into my things that make stuff, and that stuff that was made by the things that made stuff would in turn be fed into another thing that made stuff, and more stuff was thusly made - specifically, a final pickaxe that would do some ungodly violence to stuff I could find.

Upon realizing this grind and witnessing what I had made (but mostly, reading that there truly was no "ending"), I stopped, uninstalled, and haven't looked back. Forager provided me with some jokes, some puzzles (most of which I sorta hated and over half of which I didn't bother with), some thoughts on the genre of crafting games, but not much else. I gave it my time, and it took my time and made it into stuff, which didn't exist, and don't exist anymore.

SaGa Frontier Remastered

I really didn't think this would happen. Mostly remembered as the next release by Squaresoft after Final Fantasy VII for the PSX, no one liked SaGa Frontier when it came out, because it is a SaGa game. A series of confusion and bewilderment, whose periodic reinfection of Final Fantasy - in the oft-vomited-upon II and the sphere nonsense of X - only reminds RPG nuts that, Oh yeah, Those games. 

Akatoshi Kawazu, the madman who's somehow survived nearly forty years at one of the most wild-ass companies in Japan, continues to be allowed to make these games. Japan loves them, somewhat! The US doesn't like them, but now, there is a market and audience for all nonsense, and now, NOW is the time for SaGa. The path to Frontier was paved by re-releases of Romancing SaGa II, III, and that new one that people say is good.

I have more of an interest in witnessing and touching SaGa games than I do in playing them to completion. They are hard to describe. Let YouTube describe them to you, perhaps. I have loved these games in the past, and particularly Frontier, but the remakes of II and III bounced me a bit, mostly due to the HD-ification of the menus & graphics (they look BAD and feel BAD), and the fact that I can't dash in the field without losing my formation in combat? Like, I am holding down B to run faster around a dungeon, and I touch a monster, and now I am fighting, and all my guys are just in a defenseless & bonus-less mess? That sucks! Why would you DO That? Why not fix that absolutely not integral part of the original experience, so it maybe isn't so bad!

The answer is, Kawazu is a madman. He's been involved in all the recent remakes & re-releases, and you know, I have not hated him for it. I want to return to those, and see what the hell. Hell, I want to write a whole series about these games, because they're just so weird and counter-intuitive and counter-contemporary, and really, just against convention itself. I like that.

So perhaps I shall say more, in the future, but regarding Frontier? They did a good fixing. The menus don't look like shit, and the art of the game could only improve from the blurred CG-into-sprite Donkey-Kong-Country-Ass psychadelia of robots and monsters and vampires of the original. They even added some new game+ benefits to carry between stories - did I mention this has like 7 characters, with their own stories, which sometimes overlap, but mostly they are self-contained, and it all uses the same world, and in that way, it is its own metaverse, LEGO figures moving in different ways across the same playscape every day of the week. 

Right now, I'm probably halfway through T260G's story, the little robot who could (find out he is a space weapon from thousands of years ago, unearthed by a boy and destined to discover himself). I reached the point where I can change his whole model into another kind of robot, which rules, and I have two other robots in my party (a truck and a fighter plane), which rules, and I have walked into the wrong dungeons a few times and wiped, which rules. It's just...its own thing so much. It is specific and unique, and I love it.

I will play more, and I will write more. God bless that madman.

NieR Replicant ver.yaddayaddayadda

I picked this up, out of fear there would be some mass spoiler-revealing happening on social media. I played a few hours, and it is NieR. As I sit on ~30 pages of a NieR: Automata explication, I realize I will play this to completion, in time. There was never a doubt.