2024-12-30: 2024 In Review

2024 was pretty wild. I don't do these year in review things often. This is the third I've done despite this blog existing for eight years now. I mostly ramble about games, but I got a few things I'm comfortable putting out on the big ol' internet in addition.

First of all, I ended up a tech administrator for Kusogrande. As a result of that I set up for them a backend video pipeline so we no longer have to capture racer streams off Twitch. It's got some bumps and dings I'm still hammering out but a couple weeks ago I finally got it to the point that I'm comfortable sharing the middleware I wrote to make it all work. It's an undocumented pile of Magic Code at the moment but it represents the ability to take a standalone WebRTC and RTMP server and turn it into a Discord screenshare approximation and stream handler. I think that's important.

Big Bad Game-a-thon 2024 went off without many hitches. I'd call this the first one I actually "ran". Last year I was the chair but I came in in the 11th hour and mostly took on a policy of "Change as little as possible". This year we made a few changes, and I think for the better. Some more well-defined policies for reviews, more careful decision-making. I don't plan to turn the marathon into a formal "thing" but having someone organizing things so everyone else can be their goofy adorable selves is important. I guess I'm doing that now.

I also had four games in that marathon, despite also running it. That might have been a bit more than I could handle; hah.

I started some shit in preservation circles. Romhacking.net closed down and I ask myself how much trouble I caused with my Langrisser Stuff and if that was part of the conflicts high up that eventually caused its collapse. At the end of the day I don't think I have that much power. I also worked with a friend to produce a more complete archival solution for FurAffinity in the wake of its founder dying and leaving its continuance a matter of question. FA looks like it'll survive, but the option for more robust and complete account archival is never a bad thing.

I launched a second website for some writing I did. To date there's not much there but I want to work more with it soon. I don't talk about that much here or on social media though. It's kind of a pen name project. But it's gotten some neat attention already!

I dropped my Twitch affiliate agreement and have never been happier. The very prior post talks about that.

Gaming stuff, I played some neat stuff worth rambling about.

Ephiam's RPG Maker Games

I discovered the RPG Maker productions by Ephiam late in the year. Three such games exist on Steam: Venaitura, To Aerthen, and the very recently released Scarmonde. Despite being "limited" to the RPG Maker engine, all three are a delight and produce very deep and meaningful RPG experiences. Venaitura and Scarmonde are both Final Fantasy I "party builder" RPGs with a bleak dismal storyline and vibe, and To Aerthen is a lighthearted romp with a static cast of well-written characters and a more comical story; though it still gets its gut punches in.

All three games introduce this fairly unique take on RPG design that I've come to associate with Ephiam. The cornerstones of this design hang around the heavy use of optional dungeons, the use of aggro control and tanking in a Final Fantasy style RPG engine, the implied promise of clear, simple, and direct signaling (no hidden items in dungeons, clearly signposted boss fights, etc), equipment being primarily side-grades and swapping for the need of the day being mandatory, healing and support abilities being sprinkled across other roles to reduce the need for a dedicated healer, and the use of extra attacks/turns as major trinkets of power progression.

Ephiam's approach feels to me like the 7th Dragon series and what I loved about it. What you need to do directly is always clear. Optionals may be there and a little bit more muddy. Many ways to produce a viable party and strategy. Your choices are clear, but your best choice is never obvious and, in fact, it may be more fun to limit yourself to not the best choices. I ran through Scarmonde with a party that was built by banning myself from the cornerstones of the "holy trinity". No core-role tanks, melees, mages, or healers. Just hybrids and weirdos. I had a blast.

The games use publicly available asset packs and, in fact, if you exist in the RPG Maker circles you may see some of these sprites, tiles, avatars, etc quite frequently (bonus note: one of the themes used in the late-game is just the Floor 1 theme from Tiny Rogues; but it's a buyable royalty-free track you can get from a Japanese composer), but that's fine. The design is top notch. I enjoyed the hell out of all three of these games.

Grandia

Grandia was a game I streamed around the summer, after many many many recommendations from various folks. I wasn't sure what to expect going in though; despite knowing it's good and having had it recommended many times, I never really sat down and looked at what it was all about. So I was pretty pleasantly surprised to find a cartoony storybook fairy tale plot with some pretty likable characters all wrapped up in an extremely playable RPG with a neat timeline-based combat system.

Grandia somehow does things a little different, and yet is all the same and comfortable at the same time. True mastery of the combat system hinges on being able to read a timeline, position attacks to hit enemies to interrupt their spell casts, and control what they're able to actually execute effectively. I never fully got the hang of it, but that's okay too because you can get by on just stopping the big nasty booms once in awhile.

It's very much an early Playstation RPG, with all the upsides and warts that come with it. There's weird loading times and loads in weird places, overuse of voice lines, some wonky controls from time to time, but also that storybook charm that RPGs in that era still wanted to capture. Most of the plot centers on a boy and girl looking for adventure, with the stakes in their quest weaving in and out in a weird inconsistent manner. It never really feels like the world is going to end if you fail, even when the stakes do begin to climb.

It was just fun to experience the story, the character interactions, the plot, and the combat. Nothing majorly deep here. The story might even be considered derivative and basic. But in an era where so many devs were trying to say something big and profound with their stories, basic was new again.

The game has a habit of forcing you to make decisions without information and punishing you for making them wrong. Party members you can invest limited, permanent resources into can leave. You can sign up to learn spell sets only to find they don't do what you expected and now a rare resource is gone. You can miss the best spells and skills by not building your party a certain way. This is kind of part of the DNA of an RPG from this era, really. But even still, there's nothing you can't muscle through with just numbers, and you can get those numbers pretty easily if you need. It's not a very grindy game.

You're going to hear "Oh flame burn em!" a lot though.

Ringlorn Saga

An impulse $2 buy earlier in the year. Ringlorn Saga positions itself as a Hydlide clone that fixes the pain points of Hydlide. You know what? It absolutely is. Ringlorn somehow takes the core combat and exploration formula of Hydlide and makes it into something playable and fun.

The basic formula is the same: bump combat, a grid-based open world where you can go pretty much anywhere, and having to explore it to find things to bring you closer to ready to fight the big bad evil thing. How it mixes things up comes down to two major changes to the bump combat engine:

First, the introduction of positional advantages in combat, like early Ys games had. If you strike an enemy from the back or the side, you won't take any damage (most of the time). This alone means you have a way to control incoming damage and attrition, putting it head and shoulders above Hydlide.

Second, the introduction of three combat stances: Bash, Slash, and Stab. Most enemies are weak to one and strong or immune to another. Some enemies will also cause retaliatory damage if you attack with the wrong one. Most rooms consist of enemies weak to different things, forcing you to carefully position to hit the right enemy in the right stance to maximize your damage and minimize your health loss. It's a ton more in depth than Hydlide and "run into the enemy until you need to heal" for sure.

It's a short game. Even the first playthru shouldn't take you more than 8 hours. I think I took 5. It's so darn neat though that someone took Hydlide of all things and elevated it in the 2020s into something so cool and playable.

There's a sequel I haven't tried yet that apparently lets you turn into monsters. It's on my list.

Tales of Symphonia

I just finished this on stream, and it's a big one. This might be one of the longest stream games I've done. It gave 100%ing 7th Dragon a run for its money and clocked in at around 52 hours.

I'm a pretty big Tales fan. Symphonia is Tales game number 6 I finished. It's a bit of a weird one, representing the first jump to 3D the series attempted. It mostly worked, but has some scrapes to contend with. It's not full 3D: you're stuck on a 2D plane with your enemy and to truly move cross-axis you need to target a different enemy. That's fine; when are you going to want to move in a way that isn't on-axis with some enemy or another? Its targeting system needs some work, jumping is weird. These are all growing pains of branching out to a new engine and battlefield projection.

Beyond those quibbles it's a Tales game, and has the same feel as Phantasia, Destiny, and Eternia. These early Tales games impress upon me two things: a tight action RPG combat engine more reminiscent of fighting games than RPGs, and protagonists being the absolute biggest dorks you could find. Lloyd is a dork. Possibly the biggest dork of them all. But he's earnest, and drives forward this marathon of a plot with a consistent, comfortable optimism and determination. But he's a dork.

Like a lot of early RPGs, the plot is all about fantasy racism, how tiring. This one at least moves past that into this baffling strings-on-corkboard unfolding plot that has you bouncing between suspicions on who the true bad guys really are until the very end when the pieces snap together and you see who's really controlling the grand scheme and who's just a pawn. I will admit this is one of the few storylines that surprised me. I get one or two of those a year.

This was also the first Tales game I went in dead-hecking-set on trying to main someone besides the protagonist. I think this might be the worst game to try that, as I eventually ended up back to controlling Lloyd. He's just the most flexible, most fleshed out, and most controllable in battle. I think unless you're challenging yourself, or you have a very strong preference for a slower combat style, you're just stuck with him. That's fine though, he's agile and fun to play. I didn't mind.

My one only real complaint about Symphonia is apparently the entire final quarter of the game can be altered significantly by making a choice, when you don't even know you're making a choice. One of those "Do something different from what you're told here to change everything" situations. I kind of dislike those. At least when it's not signaled well. Is that a small complaint? I think it is; you could finish the game and never know you had a different choice to make, and it'd be fine and great and wrap up well. Just, huh.

2025 Plans

I haven't played as many games as I used to, ever since I moved and ended up with a lot more of a life to tend to. I got some super neat stuff in this year, and a lot of non-game stuff in too. The coming year, I have a few things penciled in:

How much of that will get done? Hopefully all of it. We'll see though. I have new ideas and new plans all the time.

tags: year_in_review