I have a bit of a fixation on games like Vampire Survivor. I never fully gelled on what those are as a genre. I've heard the simplistic "VS clone", I've heard the tongue in cheek "Garlic-like", and the more scholarly "Survival roguelite", but you know the vibe. You run around beating up an infinite swarm of foes, gaining meta-progression currency to buy better starting state to be able to beat up even more foes next time. It's a good 20 minute brain-off thing for me; except I typically do about 10 runs in a row then it's time to go to bed, ugh!
There's like a thousand games like this out now, and yeah a lot of them are kind of just low effort clones to try to cash in on the trend. There's a couple I came to really enjoy though; enough that I'd put VS itself at a strong 3 out of 5. Some of them are a completely different take on the formula and some are pretty much just copy cats with a little more polish in places I wanted polish.
Rogue Genesia tried to create a more roguelite "run with goals and progression" approach than VS itself. It somewhat lifted the map and stage system from Slay the Spire, presenting a tree of nodes you traverse and get a short snippet of gameplay in each. Each node can have different objectives like a specific kill count, defeating a boss, or simple survival.
Leveling up provides you with cards. Individual cards can be weapons, but they can also be anything from a massive array of smaller upgrades. Think things like "+10% damage" rather than the big bombastic passives of VS. But you get hundreds of them in a run. In fact, if you do a full run with some of the "+Experience" meta-progression in place, you'll likely exhaust the deck and do the final couple of stages with literally everything either acquired or banished. This does create a feel of runs ending in the same way, but you have a limited number of weapon slots and your weapon choices dictate what you do or don't want to keep or banish, so there's variety.
Read More...It's been awhile. I've been keeping busy and posting a lot of stuff on Fediverse things I guess.
This month's been a thing. The theme seems to be the sunset of massive decades-old data stores and that data just slipping into the aether, or community wells suddenly disappearing. Or at least that's what it looks like from where I sit and the communities I exist in.
First you have RHDN which announced suddenly, out of nowhere for 99% of its users, that it would be deleting all the hacks, translations, and patches it had and becoming a news-only site. This change was more or less immediate but fortunately an archive of the patches was uploaded to the Internet Archive. In a terrible, disorganized, hard to discover and peruse format, but at least it's saved.
I'm not going to get into the politics here and now but it looks like the sudden direction change was precipitated by ego, an internal staff conflict, and one person holding all of the power over the site and deciding to fire the staff and change direction. 15 years of community around building and distributing hacks and translations gone in a blink. The forums are still unpreserved but it appears they'll remain up for now. I consider them a risk factor for data loss, and there's a lot there given RHDN has been the well for 15 years.
The big damage in my eyes though is all about timing. We're at a peak of people considering Discord to be an atom of community and information. More and more groups that produce something whether that be art, or romhacks, or games, or FAQs and information are opening Discord instances and just putting all their stuff there. I see "download" buttons that dump you unceremoniously at a Discord join screen now. It's anathema to preservation and ease of discovery; unfortunately the latter is sometimes considered a bonus point. Especially if what you're doing is grey-legal.
Read More...The SaGa series is pretty storied at this point. A massive spanning affair with a couple dozen installments stretching back to the original Game Boy days, it has no want for different takes on its formula or options for play. It eve has a fair number of spiritual successors in the form of The Last Remnant, Alliance Alive, Legend of Legacy... However I'm not personally aware of much that throws back to the original Game Boy games as much as pays homage to the formula itself.
The Secret of Varonis sets out to do that, and does it pretty well by my book. This one kind of came out of nowhere; I discovered it on accident while checking if another game I was interested in was on sale yet. I'm glad I did though; it was a delight to play through.
At its core, Varonis is an homage to SaGas 1 thru 3, with its creative vision drawing most strongly from the first. It doesn't pretend to be entirely its own thing, throwing you immediately at the foot of a proverbial world-spearing tower (or rather a castle with teleportation gates) right from the start. It's made very clear you'll be going on a SaGa 1 style adventure again. Varonis though knows when to lean hard into the retro aesthetic and when to pull back and do things with a little more modern spin. The quality of life improvements are strong, the opaque mechanics of a SaGa game made more clear and numbers made more explicit, and an array of difficulty and accessibility options ensure you don't need to be a die-hard SaGa expert to get into the game.
Read More...I finished Shining Resonance Refrain. I'm a fan of the Shining series; I've played a couple of entries in the Force SRPG bucket, the Soul duo, both dungeon crawlers, and I've loved all those. Resonance, that's a different far more confusing story. First of all, the Shining series has clearly changed a lot since Soul II. Soul II came out in 2004, and Resonance in 2014 (though it wouldn't see an English release until Resonance Refrain in 2018), so that's 10 years of series evolution I'm not brushed up on.
My understanding of "Shining" has a lot of specific keystones: Centaurs, Dragonutes, Birdmen, Pastes, small spell/skill lists with simple one-word names like "Fire" that have selectable power levels to give them variety, extremely storybook fantasy plots with simple blank self-insert protagonists... But apparently all of that ended after Soul II. Looking through various Wikipedia articles on the series, I pin most of this on the introduction of Tony Taka to the design team.
Tony Taka is not a name I've heard of before, but he's apparently been around the block a few times. He's a character artist and video game designer who mainly focuses on harem stories and has quite a few eroge titles to his credit. I don't know how much sway he had over overall design, but his introduction to Shining coincides with a shift in focus from storybook high fantasy to something a little more earthy and base.
This is a lot of words to run up to the point that Shining Resonance is a harem story game. This is a change I certainly wasn't prepared for. "Harem" in this sense refers to a plot where you have a protagonist who ends up surrounded by love interests and a part of that story is the protagonist dealing with sorting that out. Resonance dives into this pretty deeply while running a parallel thread of an over-the-top Exalted-tier high-powered battle fantasy story. The resulting blend doesn't quite hit it for me, and I don't think results in a good match for each other.
The most typical pejorative I see in criticism of the game's plot is "stereotypical anime". I don't even know what that's supposed to mean, frankly. Artistically though there's a fair amount of exposed skin and ample bosom but it doesn't tread into the realm of eroge, as one would likely expect a Sega game to not do.
Read More...I don't think I kept it a secret that I've been slowly falling out of the speedrunning world. I left Best of NES for various reasons, I felt like Speedgaming kind of packed up and moved on to bigger things without me, my interactions with Edge Case Collective kind of fizzled out, I never really felt comfortable in Power Up With Pride, Handheld Heroes stopped running, and I kind of came to the conclusion that I wanted to chase new and different experiences and deepen my knowledge of the world of game design and writing rather than experience the same game over and over again. Then on top of all of that I had my growing concern that GamesDoneQuick was going somewhere I would not be able to follow.
I've had a weird arm's length relationship for GDQ for years. It's the kind of relationship where people tell you "We're an event for the community and we also do charity" and you believe what they're saying, but in the back of your mind you remember a system is what it does, not what it says. GDQ's system for the past five or six events has been to pump as much cash in the direction of the charity as is possible and sometimes, perceivably, at the expense of the event's presentation and execution. I don't have a problem with this; the charities they support are both super important and hit close to home to me for multiple reasons. However when it comes to places where I feel like I have a community, GDQ isn't it.
I've come out of events seeing the very tiny marks I made on the speedrunning world and saying "Part of that massive charity drive was my doing" and been proud of that. That's kind of the limits of my involvement here. However through the last few events I didn't even feel that. Those events were marred by some major signaling issues including making decisions that amounted to sacrificing a runner's entire run on the marathon in favor of pushing a donation incentive harder. That said, the reality of it is apparently more complex and backroom conversations were had, but the net result is that. I didn't want to be a part of that.
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