toxicitizen

Onimusha: Way of the Sword I went into this one with pretty high expectations. I was basically hoping for Samurai Resident Evil 4. And that's not too far off from what the game ended up being. Roughly half of the game is linear areas that are structured pretty much like in RE4. The other half is spent running around Eastern Kyoto doing side-quests, finding secrets and unlocking new sections of the map as you progress through the story. That second half is the weakest aspect of the game. It's fine but it gets kind of repetitive after a while. The entire map looks very samey and after a while you run out of new things to do, so you just end up repeating the same kind of missions. If they make a sequel, I really hope they'll take the time to make the side-content meatier and add more variety to the map. The combat is where the game really shines, though. Combat against basic enemies is way too easy early on but once you start running into bosses it's a completely different game. This is the most satisfying sword combat I've played since Sekiro. It's nowhere near as difficult and it's definitely not a souls-like. But once you've got a boss' pattern down, it gets into a very similar rhythm where it almost feels like a rhythm game. Parry a few attacks to enter the blaze state, then start deflecting attacks to chip away at their stamina bar and once that's depleted you get an opening to hit them with an Issen Break attack that takes a huge chunk of their health bar. There's a training room you can go into to replay the tutorials and rematch all the bosses and I think the biggest compliment I can give to the game is that I almost always went in there for the rematch immediately after beating a new boss in the story. It was just so satisfying to fight them again after mastering their moveset and just wipe the floor with them. Especially the ones that gave me trouble in the story. Even when the early game bosses start being re-used as minibosses later on in the game, it never bothered me to fight them again. And now that I'm done, I can't wait to jump into new game plus on Carnage difficulty and do it all over again. So yeah, that's another banger from Capcom. At this point that's like 3 GOTY contenders from them this year. If it wasn't for GTA 6, I'd say they have it on lockdown...

It's also not an RTS but an open-world shooter apparently...

Along with their respective amiibos. Cause I buy amiibos now, I guess. I was planning on continuing my Metroid series marathon soon, so now I've got a specific date to shoot for. Shouldn't be too long anyway, up next is Samus Returns, then Metroid Fusion and Dread. I may or may not skip Super Metroid since I've played it before.

September is insanely packed this year. I'm really glad Capcom decided to release Onimusha three weeks earlier because both of these dropping on the same day was fucking brutal. These are both no-brainer day one purchases for me, so I wouldn't have known which one to play first. I'll probably get Silent Hill Townfall as well but that one can wait until closer to launch.

Pokémon FireRed I picked it up when they released the port on the eShop earlier this year and got most of the way through it but then something else came out that distracted me from it and I only just got around to finishing it. Except for a difficulty spike at the very end that forced me to spend a few hours grinding, I enjoyed it for the most part. I did what little bit of story there is in the post-game and I'm at the point where all that's left to do is grind some more and fill out the pokédex. And since I don't have anyone to trade with, I'm not going to bother. It was fun to revisit the series after all this time, though. I had only played the first two gens on gb/gbc back in the day, so this version was good for a retro nostalgia trip while still feeling a bit fresh. I definitely want to play more of the series but I'm not sure where to go next. There's rumors that more ports might be coming soon so maybe I'll just wait for those but it's tempting to jump ahead to the more recent gens to see what modern Pokémon games are like.

A Whole Lotta Kirby So, one of the things that made the Switch 2 so appealing to me was the size of the library available on it, not just the ports and remasters on the Switch itself but also the retro games available on NSO. One of the series I'd been meaning to dig into properly was Kirby. So I spent the month of July playing nothing but Kirby games. Kirby's Dream Land 1 and 2 (GB) They're simple and cute little Game Boy platformers. I kinda figured I'd try them for a few minutes and move on but I ended up playing them all the way through in one sitting. The second one in particular was pretty fun but it got kinda bullshit hard by the end and I don't think I would've bothered finishing it without save states. 7/10 Kirby's Adventure (NES) This one was actually impressive for an NES title. The art style is simple enough that they were able to push the graphics way past what the average NES game looked like. It doesn't quite feel a generation ahead of its time but almost. If you bumped up the graphics a bit, it would basically feel like a SNES game because it brought the gameplay to the level you'd expect out of a Kirby game. Basically, Sakurai was already cooking way back then. That being said, the emulator crashed in the middle of the final boss fight and my only save state was like 2 full worlds back so I watched the ending on youtube because I wasn't replaying all of that. 7.5/10 Kirby Super Star (SNES) This is the only game that I had played a little of back in the day. I think this one is considered the gold standard when it comes to 2D Kirby games and it's easy to see why. It's split up into multiple mini-campaigns and every single one is firing on all cylinders. Not much else to say other than it's a fantastic game. 9/10 Kirby's Dream Land 3 (SNES) I guess this is where they started the "Kirby but with a __ art style" gimmick. It has this watercolor painting art style that looks really beautiful. It might actually be the best looking SNES game I've seen. Unfortunately, it felt kinda sluggish to play. The gameplay was significantly slower than the previous games and the animal mounts didn't feel anywhere near as useful as in Dream Land 2. I had to force myself to finish it and I didn't get the true ending because it requires you to find a hidden collectible in every single level and I only found a handful of them organically. I wasn't going to replay most of the game just for this so I just watched the true ending on youtube. It's basically just an extra phase to the final boss. 5/10 Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards I was bracing myself for the worst with this one since games from that era haven't aged the best but I was pleasantly surprised. It immediately felt really good to play, especially after Dream Land 3. It also looked really good for an N64 game. I don't know if Nintendo's emulator is running games at a higher internal resolution of if the scanlines filter was just doing heavy lifting on the admittedly very simple graphics but the image looked incredibly sharp to me. There isn't that much to say about it beyond that. It's basically a glorified 2D platformer. I wouldn't even call it 2.5D, it's way too simple for that. You can combine two copy abilities to create a stronger ability, which was a pretty fun twist but you only end up relying on a few overpowered ones. I got most of the collectibles by playing the game normally and I was having a good time with it, so I went back and got the ones I was missing for the true ending. It also just added an extra phase to the final boss and then a little extra cutscene. 8/10 At this point I still had a GBA game and a couple of classic style games on Switch that I could play but I only had a week left before the physical release of Xenoblade Chronicles, which I was planning to play immediately, so I decided to skip ahead to: Kirby and the Forgotten Land + Star-Crossed World This was the one I was most looking forward to playing, so I figured I'd use the limited time I had left to play it. It's basically to the old games what 3D World was to 2D Mario. It feels like a 2D platformer that was given a third-dimension without turning it into a full-blown 3D game. It's pretty great! I wouldn't say it was as good as Mario 3D World (or as challenging) but if you're in the mood for a cute and fun platformer, you could do much worse. It's definitely one of my favorite Switch games so far. I got all the collectibles for the base game and the DLC and completed most of the post-game stuff. The only things I have left to do are some of the harder mini-games that seem like they would be more frustrating than fun. I might come back to them to get 100% eventually but for now I think I'm good. 10/10 edit: Oh and I realized I never posted my friend code. Feel free to add me: SW-3747-9638-1387

New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe I was under the impression that the New series wasn't that well-liked, so I wasn't sure what to expect but Nintendo fans are crazy, man. This was great! It was like playing a more modern version of Super Mario World. I cleared every level, got every secret exit, collected every star coin and cleared star road to get 5 stars on my save file. Then I did it all over again in New Super Luigi U. I enjoyed Luigi U even more because of its focus on shorter, faster levels. Although it was kind of a bummer that they re-used the same world map as the main game. Anyway, I thought this was going to be a double entry with Star Fox but holy shit, fuck that game! I genuinely can't remember the last time I hit such an insane difficulty spike in a video game. I was enjoying the campaign just fine. Some levels were a little challenging but I was getting used to it. And then I got to the boss of Area 6 and I wanted to fucking scream. Like, death after death after death with no fucking idea what the hell I was doing wrong. And when I finally managed to beat that level, the final one was even worse! You're fighting another squad and you can barely keep them on screen long enough to try to hit them, they keep moving in ways the camera can't even track and as soon as they disappear off-screen they're already behind you somehow, trying to crawl up your ass. I made it to the final boss once, with only one life left and that motherfucker just immediately swallowed me and blew up my ship. I think I hate this fucking game, oh my god!

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening I was looking for something short to play on my Switch until Star Fox and ended up picking this because the Ocarina of Time Remake announcement put me in a Zelda mood. It's basically a smaller version of Link to the Past, so I don't need to tell you how great it is. I ended up going for all hearts containers (and every other optional things I could find) which I don't think I've done in any Zelda games since the original OoT on N64. I hope they'll remake Link to the Past in this style eventually. I'd be way more excited for that than I am for Ocarina. Although before that, I need Nintendo to stop fucking around and put Wind Waker HD and Twilight Princess HD on Switch already!

007 First Light This turned out to be both less like Hitman and more like James Bond than I expected. Overall, I really enjoyed it. It's definitely the best Bond game so far simply by virtue of not just being a glorified shooter. This adapts the full experience of being Bond including the social stealth aspect and the way you can recover from breaking stealth just by throwing a few punches. Getting spotted in Hitman usually means immediately reloading whereas in this I always just rolled with it since that seemed to be in the spirit of the game. I kinda wish it was more open-ended, though. I don't see a ton of replayability in the main campaign. The levels really aren't as sandboxy as in Hitman. And it remains to be seen how much longevity TacSim will actually add to the game. I guess that's going to largely depend on how much content they plan to add post-launch because right now there doesn't seem to be a ton of content there. Especially considering the amount of cosmetics I've already unlocked from pre-order bonuses, twitch drops and Hitman account linking. So I'm expecting the support to be rather extensive and long-term. I'm a long time Hitman fan, and as much as I'm looking forward to the next Hitman, I wouldn't be mad if IO Interactive alternated between Hitman and this for the next decade. I definitely hope it does well enough for a sequel to happen, at least.

Ditto Shovel Knight was way too good for me not to get this day one. I'll probably play it next once I'm done with First Light.

Dragon Quest XII: The Flames of Fate has restarted development and is now Dragon Quest XII: Beyond Dreams. Coming: not anytime soon lol. At least we actually get some footage of this version, though.

Hitman 2 I decided to replay this to kill some time while I wait for First Light but this turned out to not be a normal playthrough. It started out normal enough, I was going to replay the story and then go for all the achievements so I could transfer my progress into Hitman: World of Assassination and finally play the last set of levels and the end of the story. Well, turns out I waited too long to do this because about halfway through the Hitman 1 levels I found out they killed the Hitman 3 transfer when they added cross-progression to the game. So now I have to once again redo everything in Hitman: WoA. Which isn't a bad problem to have, I'm already looking forward to starting over on a fresh save. But it is a hell of a time sink so idk when I'll get around to do that. Maybe the Steam Frame will be out by then and I'll be able to do it in VR. Anyway, once I found out I couldn't transfer my progress, I changed my approach. Instead of treating it like a story replay, I switched into achievement hunting mode. I started skipping all the story cutscenes so that my next run in WoA would be somewhat fresh and I started being more optimal with my runs. I realized that if I started every level with a Master Difficulty/Suit Only/Silent Assassin/Sniper Assassin run (using a video guide), I would unlock a shit ton of "classics" challenges and would get enough xp to almost max out level mastery immediately (since I was already halfway there on most levels). That made things much more efficient and I started making progress much faster from that point on. It also had the added benefit that I didn't spend hours exploring every nook and cranny of every level. So once again, my next run in WoA should be somewhat fresh when played normally. The only issue was the multiplayer achievements for the Sniper levels but I found someone willing to help on the Steam forum. At this point, the forum is basically nothing but people looking for help with those achievements. I wasn't sure I'd have enough time to finish this before First Light came out but as it turns out now I have another week and a half to kill...

Oh right, yeah, me too.

I don't know if this counts as a trope but I've been replaying Hitman 2 and the game has honest to god functional mirrors. And this was right before ray-tracing became really prevalent, so it doesn't kill the performance and it doesn't look like a blurry mess because of DLSS because the game supports neither of those things. As far as I can tell, they don't use the old trick of rendering the room a second time, either. And by functional I don't just mean clear, visible reflections. If you pull out a gun while standing behind an NPC, they'll spot you in the reflection and react accordingly. It's just one of those things that games stopped bothering with so long ago that I've gotten used to mirrors in games just being some kind of weird-looking blurry surfaces. So when you run into one that actually works it's a nice detail. It's the kind of attention to detail that I've come to only expect from developers like Remedy at this point. I still remember when I found a projector in Control, lifted it with telekinesis and the image it was projecting on the wall reacted accordingly and even spun around with the projector. They're small, superficial details but I always appreciate it when devs actually bother to implement them realistically.

New Zachtronics Coincidence game just shadow-dropped yesterday! At least, I don't think it was announced prior to this. Like Kaizen, it doesn't look like it involves actual coding or have a physical edition, sadly. But that's still an instabuy for me!