#736 Valkyria Chronicles 4 (Switch) – Fall 2018
All I played from this series were the first and fourth games; not sure if I missed much by skipping the portable entries. One and four were both solid enough, with nice hand-drawn graphics and Hitoshi Sakimoto music which is always a huge plus for me. Don't recall too much about this, and what I do recall, I'm not certain if it's from the first game or this one.
Toughest Part...in either this or VC1: The blue-haired super-woman that you have to snipe from a distance...I think she was in the first game, actually
#737 Five Nights At Freddy's: Sister Location (Switch) - Winter 2018
The fifth and final FNAF game I played. Really should have stopped with FNAF3. Each one was less enjoyable than the one before it, and this was the worst. Deviates entirely from the normal FNAF formula even more than FNAF4 did. Rather than having a basic formula that repeats and gets tougher each time, this gives you a bunch of stages to go through that are all different. ...and all pretty bad.
The only actual traditional FNAF gameplay is found in a secret level that's almost impossible to get to (I sure never did). The whole game should have just been that secret level, repeating and getting more difficult. It's crazy that the only good part of this game is essentially locked up in a safe to keep it away from the player. Also, some versions of this game aren't even completable; I played the phone version first, then the PS4 version, and finally the Switch version before I was able to get to the end without some major problem happening. The phone version was straight-up broken.
Toughest Part: The Mini-reenas climbing into the suit level. That level is horrendous and probably ends most playthroughs.
#738 Pokemon: Let's Go Pikachu (Switch) – Winter 2018
The ultimate Gen 1 remake, with 3D visuals, on an actual console no less. I think it was the first console "main series" Pokémon game. This was a sure-fire hit, and awesome in some regards while completely dropping the ball, so to speak, in others. This game is warm and fuzzy, and a good simulator of walking around Kanto with your own pet Pikachu (or Eevee). No evolving them, they're stuck in base form, but they're a really powerful version of that base form anyway. This is a game with a ton of potential, and it's good for what it is, but man, they sure made a lot of mistakes with it too. For one thing, it's way too easy. Way, way too easy. You could go through the entire game with just Pikachu and probably not even have that much trouble. It took like two thirds of the game before any boss fight even remotely threatened me with a loss.
What Were They Thinking? - Replacing random battles with a tedious ball-throwing minigame where you just pelt random monsters with Pokeballs until you catch them. Sometimes it takes a bunch of them and you start to wonder why you're spending your time this way. Also, every missed throw is a lost Pokeball. Why? You can't go pick them up? And who thought it was a good idea for a Pokémon game to have fewer battles in it? This one element of the game significantly tanks it on points.
What Were They Thinking? 2 - The hero Pikachu learns a move early in the game (Electro Drift, I think) that he doesn't get in any other versions. It usually critical hits and almost always goes first. If you just spam that one move, he pretty much steamrolls most of the game. He also gets moves that crush Brock, so even that first boss that he was previously at a disadvantage against is a non-factor here. I assume Eevee gets similar boosts. It trivializes the game, in any case.
Best Version of Gen 1 is?: FireRed/LeafGreen still. It's much closer to the original in design and what made it so great, while fixing the things that didn't without going overboard. Though I appreciate the effort with this one.
Posts HERE.
#739 Assassin's Creed Origins (Playstation 4) – Winter 2018
A reboot of sorts for this series, this is the first of the "open world" style ACs. The traditional ACs had long-since worn out their welcome. Assassin's Creed 4 was the last one to really be a success, and the last few entries (Rogue, Unity, Syndicate) were all kinda poorly-received in different ways. I thought Syndicate was great, and a spot-on recreation of Victorian London, but that's me. Unity has some weird issues, but it's good too. They're all at least good.
Well, Origins totally overhauls the series, adding level-ups, a much larger and more open world to explore, and a lot more of a focus on side-objectives. The traditional style of AC would briefly return later with AC Mirage, but other than that it's been open-world style games since Origins.
This game tells the story of the very beginning of the Assassin's Order, in ancient Egypt (not sure which era exactly, as "ancient Egypt" as we think of it was like a 3,000-year span of time; to folks at the end of that era, the early parts of that era were as mysterious and far away from them historically as the late era is to us now).
Toughest Part - The boss fights in the postgame DLC. The level requirements to actually win start to get steep around that point, which is really annoying. It's the worst application of leveling up as a game concept, using it to block off progress unless you do X amount of sidequests.
#740 Wild Arms 3 (Playstation 4 Remaster) – January 2019
At the beginning of 2019, I stopped noting games by season and started noting them by month, to be a bit more precise. This is when I realized I was likely going to use the list for some sort of content eventually, so precision going forward made sense. Just needed to knock out 260 more for the list to be done!
This game was a long time coming. I loved the first two games in the series back in the day. This third one never really grabbed my interest, but I got it on a sale and figured why not give it a go. It's decent. Was the end of my playing this series, but it was a perfectly normal 2000's PS2-era RPG. It took me a while to grind through and I definitely liked the first two more. Oddly enough, I did posts for this game, which is pretty rare for a non-retro RPG. Will I ever go back and do posts for Wild Arms 1 and 2? It's possible.
Posts HERE.
#741 Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Switch) – February 2019
#742 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Playstation 3 Remaster) – February 2019
A game that everyone on the planet liked except me, I think. Over the years I made multiple large-scale attempts to beat this game, on multiple systems, and all of them fell apart at some point. I finally managed to finish the game by ripping it apart with cheat codes.
Path of Least Resistance: Punching in the "spawn a jetpack" code every mission is the quickest route through the game. The jetpack lets you skip pretty much all of the overland travel while also having the precision to drop in exactly where you need to. Also it's a lot of fun to play around with. So I spent most of the game hovering around and zipping from point A to point B, rarely ever having to pilot a car to get where I was going. I basically turned the game into Saints Row 4.
Hardest Missions: There were 3 in particular that were nearly game-enders. 1) The one where you have to keep up with the damn train, CJ. It's early in the game and it's a massive spike in the difficulty. 2) There's a mission where you have to pilot an RC plane by remote control. Thing is atrociously hard to control and I failed the mission countless times trying to get it to do anything I needed it to do. 3) There's a series of flight challenges late in the game before you can head to the final town, Vegas. These involve flying a plane through rings and stuff. It is, again, atrociously hard to control, and you constantly lose altitude, and everything about it is just awful. That ended my final run at the PS2 version, to the point that I deleted all my saves in rage.
What Were They Thinking: In this remaster, I got past the flight challenge by punching in codes to increase all my driving/flying skill levels to maximum...which made the plane way easier to control and allowed me to finish the flight level with some challenge but not much fuss. Before that, the plane would veer all over the place randomly due to my character's flying skill level being low. After the codes, I just flew in a straight line and it was up to me to steer it from there. Felt like how the level should have just been to begin with. Why even have driving/flying skill levels? Just have the character not completely suck at flying a plane by default and leave it up to player skill from there.
#743 Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (Nintendo DS) – February 2019
My least-favorite Zelda game ever. It's a sequel to Wind Waker, so it could be great. All it had to do was be a 2D sequel to Wind Waker. Instead...we got stylus controls making everything more tedious, and generally boring gameplay where winning any fight is a matter of just tapping the enemy really fast to hack away. I played this purely out of obligation to finish the Zelda series - something I still haven't managed to do almost a decade later. Somehow I'm still missing six Zelda games (not counting the three on CD-I which would make it nine... it's alright to not count those, right?)
Worth Noting: The box art for the Japanese version is much nicer/calmer/friendlier than the U.S. version, where Link is ready for battle. This...is much more common in video games than you might think. Here's Spirit Tracks doing the same thing:
Worst Dungeon: The Temple of the Sea, or whatever the main center dungeon is that you have to repeat a bunch of times as you go through the game, getting a little further each time thanks to your latest item. This game is truly like being in Purgatory. No, it is Hell.
#744 Far Cry: New Dawn (Playstation 4) – March 2019
A sequel and/or spinoff of Far Cry 5, using the same engine and a similar setting. This takes place in a fictional post-apocalyptic timeframe, in a small town. Has a weird, neon color scheme with lots of purple and green on everything. These two young women take over the cult started by cult leader Joseph Seed in Far Cry 5, and their methods are much more direct and bloody than Joseph's plots and machinations were. In any case, this is very much a spinoff / not a full Far Cry game, and feels like a DLC that got repurposed into a normal game release. I blasted through it fairly quickly.
A game that weirdly enough takes place before Origins, putting us in the Greek age. If AC4: Black Flag is the pinnacle of the traditional AC games, Odyssey is the pinnacle of the open world era of AC games. It takes everything Origins did so well and improves all of it across the board. It's an extremely long, meaty game, which took me around 70 hours (crazy for an AC game) and has you traveling all around the Greek Isles.
Unfortunately, the size of the game is the one thing really working against it. Even just doing the main campaign, it takes so long that the game begins to wear out its welcome. Especially if you dip into the plethora of side quests or try to actually clear the target board of cultists. Which reminds me, another weakness of the game is that, like Origins, the level up system ends up working against it when it's mostly just used to gate the player off from things. Leveling really needed to be kept out of the AC series and it actively brings down the open world games.
Most Memorable Moment - Finally unmasking the head of the snake, the leader of the secret society that you've been slowly killing your way through, and finding out that she has been controlling both sides of the war the entire time.
Character of Choice: The woman. Which reminds me, this was the first console main series AC game to actually let you choose a female lead. Not that it matters because the game is a carbon copy of the guy's adventure (which is clearly the first/main game they made) with everything just directly copypasta'd over. She's got no story of her own to tell. It's a shame that we didn't get a playable Elise in AC Unity, for one. At least Syndicate lets you play as Evie quite a bit.
#746 Devil May Cry 5 (Playstation 4) – March 2019
Flew through this one. Really good modern game, but it didn't make much of an impression on me compared to the old ones. Also Dante is way older now. For me, I think the DMC series is just that initial trilogy, as lame as the second game is. Four and Five are both good games, but I found the first three to be the real classics that capture the mood and take me back to that turn-of-the-century era of badassery and 3D adventure newness.
#747 Wolfenstein: The Spear of Destiny (PC) – March 2019
The sequel to Wolfenstein 3D that nobody seems to know exists, this is an awesome game that adds a bunch more levels. It has a much more mystical feel to it, and culminates with a fight against SATAN HIMSELF. It's just more of the same as the original game, other than that. Same weapons, level types, etc.
Fun Fact: Wolfenstein 3D on the SNES included levels and bosses from this game, as well as from the PC version of Wolfenstein 3D. So it's actually a fusion of the two games. I never knew this until this point. They left enough meat on the bone of both games (only using about half of the content from each) that they could have easily made a Wolfenstein 3D II on the system as well. Then console gamers could have also fought SATAN.
#748 Raiden V (Playstation 4) – March 2019
Vertical shooter. Almost no recollection of this game at all. Would have been a good thing to do a post of, but no post exists. All I know for sure about this game is that it has WAY too much information on screen. It needed about 50% less UI and 50% more gameplay window. Who is going to be reading all of that or looking at all of those charts and radars while playing a shmup that demands their attention? This game looks like most gaming websites, with the actual content buried under all kinds of ads and popups.
#749 Mortal Kombat 11 (Playstation 4) – April 2019
I like this one because it does new stuff with the plot rather than re-treading old storylines like the previous two games (though they did a great job with it). The Aftermath DLC is actually the game's best part, giving you about 50% more runtime to the story mode and bringing back classic Shang Tsung, among many other awesome developments.
Mortal Kombat 1 directly branches off of this game, as two of the timelines created by it end up clashing with each other (one timeline where Liu Kang won and remade the world, one where Shang Tsung won and remade the world). Also, the animated movie Snow Blind (which is incredible and you should seek it out) is based directly off of this game and follows a third timeline where Kano remade the world.
Favorite Character: This version of Sindel is gorgeous and has a ton of personality. She's a formidable character, both in fights and also in her ability to scheme and manipulate.
Posts HERE.
#750 - Another Metroid 2 Remake (PC) - April 2019
Now this is a remake. It's a Zero Mission style redesign of Metroid 2 like Nintendo should have done to begin with. Being a PC game it's a bit prettier and higher-res than a GBA game would have been. Hard to believe that originally this was designed by a single guy. Basically could have been the next Axiom Verge if the guy had changed the names around. Solely out of love of the game, he put this out and made zero profit off of it. Nintendo really should have monetized this and put it out on their systems, with the creator being given a share of the profits along with the tools and leeway to improve on it. The company itself certainly could have put some polish on it as well. It would have cost waaaay less than Samus Returns did and probably would have had better results. Plus it would have made Nintendo look really cool for working with an independent creator.
So what's better, this or Samus Returns?: This one, no question. I'm not much of a fan of the MercurySteam Metroids. They're good games, and great for fans of Hollow Knight etc that they draw from. They don't feel like Metroid though.
Post HERE.
#751 Battlefield V (Playstation 4) - May 2019
Back to World War 2 for this one. Does some cool stuff like show you oft-ignored corners of the war, like Scandinavia.
Favorite Chapter: Norway in Winter
#752 Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (Playstation 4 Port) - June 2019
Went back and played the Borderlands series. It's a zany series with a compelling visual style and lots of equipment drops. Kinds like if World of Warcraft was a shooter series. The loot drops are Diablo 2 style and hyper-plentiful. See also Stranger of Paradise. I prefer to have few loots and each one mean something, like Souls. In any case, this game is a smaller prequel, and it's a fun time. Can play it after, or before, the original.
#753 Borderlands (Playstation 4 Remaster) - June 2019
Bookending this installment with another game that has hand-drawn looking graphics. This is the original classic that very much needed a PS4 remaster, so as soon as it got one I gave it a run. This game is awesome and was worth the buildup. Looks like I waited a bit before I did more of these, because there's a big gap before I hit Borderlands 2+3. This series is just straight-up fun, a first-person shooter with loot collecting mechanics, stats, rare drops, etc.
#754 Wolfenstein: Youngblood (Playstation 4) - July 2019
Terrible semi-sequel as they proceeded to butcher the franchise after a highly successful relaunch and a decently successful follow up. This reboot-ish abomination attempts to restart the story later in time with BJ's two daughters leading a rebellion against the nazi regime, which I guess was still in power a couple decades after The New Colossus. Well, guess they weren't defeated by any of BJ's efforts in the other games after all. Nope, he was just a failure at his missions who just slowed them down a little! Now these two twits are going to take them down for real!
Most people expected there to be a third game in the rebooted series to make it an even trilogy; instead we got this debacle. It's a short game, the protagonists are super annoying, and best of all it's full of smug little quips that mostly just annoyed half the audience. A waste of time and money, this more or less put the franchise to bed. Did I mention how annoying the two protagonists are? What a colossal waste of a series that to this day still hasn't gotten the third Blaskowitz game. Though it's just as well since this game rendered his efforts for naught.
This is a lot like Far Cry New Dawn in that it feels more like a DLC than a full game, it's short, and it revolves around two young women who are pretty obnoxious. Here, they're the protagonists, there, they were the antagonists. Neither game did well on sales, both were a waste of developer time.
#755 Tetris Effect (Playstation 4) - July 2019
The best "Tetris" named game since Tetris Attack back in the day. This is a gorgeous game that aims to make you feel all sorts of magical feelings. At the end of the day it's just Tetris with fancy colors and sparkles, but it sure does make the most of those colors and sparkles. This is easily my favorite way to play Tetris, I'll say that right now. Turn the lights down and turn the sound up, play this on an OLED TV, and you're in for an experience. I particularly love the themed levels and all of the moods and biomes they take you through.
Favorite Levels/Tracks in Journey Mode: Ritual Passion, Spirit Canyon
#756 Adventures of Mana (iOS/Android) - August 2019
A very close remake of Final Fantasy Adventure. This is nearly 1:1, only with gorgeous HD visuals. Punches well above its weight for a phone game. I liked how colorful it is and it was cool to be in that world again. All the FFA weapons and tools functioned just as I remembered, and the controls weren't bad at all given it's a touchscreen. Surprised this never got a console release, considering it's pretty much the same type of remake as the SoM remake we got shortly after this. Same assets and whatnot. The SoM remake already seemed pretty low-effort, and it's even moreso when you factor in that it was based off of this game's engine. They jumped to a new 3D engine for remaking the third game in the series when they made Trials of Mana (then kept that engine around for the entirely-new Visions of Mana). Too bad they didn't get that 3D engine going one game sooner, huh? SoM deserved better.
Story Note: Secret of Mana was famous for having a ton of cut story and world. Well, Ice Country in that game was also in this game, and in this game they note that it was formerly called Lorima before it was destroyed by The Empire. So the weird crystal messages in SoM about Lorima and The Empire launching missiles at each other were actually a reference to something after all. The general sadness of that area in SoM now makes a lot more sense, as well. It's too bad that so much of that game's story didn't make it into the final game.
What's better, this or Sword of Mana?: Much like with AM2R, I'd easily give the duke to the one that more closely resembles the original. AoM is definitely the one I'd go for if I ever felt the need to play Seiken Densetsu 1 again.
Posts HERE.
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